Kingdom Hearts WHITE
by Mr. Garbanzo
Summary: When the balance of a heart is disrupted, it collapses and creates a Heartless. Those who have lost their hearts continue on as beings called Nobodies. And whenever a departed soul lacks a heart, it transforms into a skull-masked monster known as a Hollow... now, the worlds of the living and the dead collide as Organization XIII's downfall leads to a surge in Hollow population.
1. See the Invisible

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter** **1**

 _~ See the Invisible ~  
_

It was a cooler-than-usual day in the early fall, more than a year after the defeat of Xemnas, when Sora, Riku, and Kairi decided to take a closer look at the signs that something unusual was going on around their hometown in the Destiny Islands.

At first, it came only in the form of rumors - that people had heard strange sounds in the streets late at night, and even that there had been mysterious disappearances. Before long, it became clear that the disappearances, at least, were more than rumors; the local newspapers became flooded with articles on just that, and "have you seen me?" notices with the missing people's faces were posted around what seemed like every corner. One night, a local drunk even claimed he had found an enormous, unidentified footprint… though unfortunately the sudden rainstorm that rolled in later that same night washed it away before anyone else could catch sight of it.

What finally lead the three to investigate, however, was the fact that the most recent disappearances were students at their school. Things were getting a little too close to home, and it was impossible to ignore all the evidence that something strange was going on. Waiting until their parents (or the mayor who took care of her in the absence of her parents, in the case of Kairi) had gone to bed for the night, the three snuck out through the windows, summoned their respective Keyblades, and took off running through the streets by the light of the crescent moon that hung overhead.

"If it's Heartless again, they'll be drawn straight to us," Riku said, taking a quick glance down at his Keyblade for a moment before looking over at Sora and Kairi to make sure they understood. Each of them gave a quick nod in response. They soon came to an intersection and each took off in a different direction, with Kairi heading toward the beach while Riku rushed toward the mountainous center of the island and Sora roamed around downtown.

He only managed to run for a couple minutes before a deafening roar stopped him in his tracks.

" _What was_ that _?"_ , the thought, glancing around for any sign of its source. It had to have been pretty big going by the sound of it, but he didn't see anything, and the streetlamps lining the sidewalk didn't seem to be helping. As far as he could see, the street was totally abandoned. _"It sounded like it wasn't too far from here, but…"_

Another roar - this one much closer - nearly made him jump from the shock. As it turned out, jumping might not have been such a bad idea - before he could so much as take a look around, something heavy struck him in the midsection and sent him flying backward, slamming into the pavement and sliding a few feet before coming to a stop. He groaned for a moment and then stood, readying his Keyblade for a fight… but when he looked around the street, there was no sign of anything that could have delivered a blow like that.

"What in the…"

Just as he had managed to catch his breath, another blow came, this one catching him in the side and throwing him to the ground. He hopped to his feet and jumped back in case a third attack was about to come from nowhere, and this time he felt a _whoosh_ of air in front of his face followed by a heavy _thud_ as a massive, invisible fist impacted the pavement right where he had stood a moment before. The crater left behind made it clear - he was certainly not alone on that street, no matter how empty it looked at a glance.

Sora took a deep breath and lunged forward, thrusting his Keyblade in the direction where the last attack had come from, but the weapon swished harmlessly through empty air. He followed this up with several more swings in all different directions, attempting to follow any possible movement of whatever invisible monster had attacked, but with no luck - it seemed that whatever had been there moments before had moved out of his reach already. Pausing for a moment, he took one hand off of his Keyblade and muttered a few magic words; grasping his Keyblade with both hands again, he raised the weapon high overhead and let out a shout.

" _Fire!"_

Instantly a ring of flames erupted around the spiky-haired boy, spreading outward in a dozen-foot radius from where he stood. Another roar echoed across the street - this one very close, and sounding angrier than before. Sora's eyes widened as he finally caught a glimpse of his attacker, albeit only in silhouette as the flames from his spell surrounded it for a moment before fading away. It was easily a dozen feet tall, with disproportionately long limbs that had barrel-sized fists on the ends. What stood out the most to him, however, was the gaping hole in its chest. He was immediately reminded of a Darkside Heartless, though the hole in this case was perfectly round rather than heart-shaped.

" _So it_ is _a Heartless, then,_ "Sora thought. He readied his Keyblade again and charged forward, leaping high into the air and aiming for where he thought the head would be based on the moments when the form of the invisible monster was revealed by his fire magic. " _No idea why I can't see it, but that shouldn't stop me from_ hitting _it!_ "

Just as the flames began to fade, Sora came crashing down, slamming his Keyblade into the creature's face. It stumbled backward, then fell, kicking up a cloud of dust and denting the pavement with its sheer weight. Sora took that opportunity to aim his Keyblade toward it and closed his eyes for just a moment, focusing magical energies toward the weapon's tip. A moment later, as the sounds of the creature shifting in an attempt to stand reached his ears, he let loose.

" _Blizzard!_ "

A rush of cold winds and spiraling ice crystals burst forth from around the Keyblade, swirling around the invisible monster and once again revealing its form. This time, however, the magic did not fade so quickly; whatever sort of Heartless Sora's opponent was, it was now frozen over with a thick layer of solid ice that made its location obvious. After flashing a quick grin, the spiky-haired boy charged his Keyblade with an aura of yellow-gold energy and rushed forward to land a finishing blow.

Standing a couple stories overhead on the roof of a nearby building, unseen by Sora, were two mysterious bystanders. One wore a long white cloak over top of a rather plain black kimono, and adjusted his glasses slightly before smiling at the sight of the spiky-haired boy's attack causing an eruption of light-energy which first shattered the ice and then destroyed the monster encased within. He had heard of a rare few living humans managing to stand up to a Hollow without even being able to see them, but not many were able to deliver a killing blow to one and none in recorded history had managed it with such ease.

"Interesting," he commented, glancing to the other black-clad figure for a moment before focusing his attention back on Sora as he rushed down another street, following the sounds of another battle taking place elsewhere. "All that without even a trace of spiritual pressure… this must be the power of the 'Keyblade.'"

His companion, a girl with silver hair tied up in twin ponytails, stared blankly ahead and nodded slightly. Her eyes followed the boy's path until he left her field of vision, making a sharp turn around the corner of a larger building and heading down another street. For a moment she closed her eyes, tilted her head to the side, and then spoke.

"He's heading toward the others, Lord Aizen."

"Hmm… so you can sense _them_ , too?"

She nodded.

"Each of the three wields a Keyblade like this boy's. Their power comes from the heart," she explained. "To a pure Soul Reaper like yourself, it must be almost undetectable… but to me it's a constant pulse in the air, thrumming louder with each move they make. I could hear them coming a mile away the moment they summoned their weapons."

* * *

On the other side of town, Riku and Kairi were in the middle of their own clash with several of the invisible monsters - though in Kairi's case they were not so invisible at all. Though she had no idea why, she alone among the three Keybearers was capable of seeing the Hollows just as clearly as anything else around them; she and Riku had teamed up soon after they had both become aware of this, with Kairi pointing out the locations of each new Hollow that appeared to Riku so that he wasn't just attacking blindly. Between the two of them, they had already destroyed several smaller Hollows.

"I'm starting to see them a little," Riku said, blinking a couple times and rubbing his eyes. "It's like… whenever they move I can just barely spot a blur in the air."

He stared off down the empty street, not seeing any sign of more Hollows. Pausing for a moment to catch his breath, he had just lowered his Keyblade when the sound of heavy footsteps reached his ears. Kairi glanced back over her shoulder and gasped, but before she had a chance to make a move (or even say a word to catch Riku's attention), the larger Hollow that had just arrived lashed out at her with a backhand that sent her flying into the nearest wall. Riku turned just in time to see her slump to the street unconscious… and in that one moment where he stood there stunned by the sight, the Hollow raised its enormous foot and kicked him in the chest, knocking him to the ground.

Riku rolled out of the way of the first two stomps that followed, but when he tried to evade the third, he found that an overturned wooden cart which had been left abandoned in the street was in the way. He raised his Keyblade just in time to halt the blurry, half-visible foot before it came crashing down on his chest, but this last-ditch effort wouldn't be enough to hold off such a heavy opponent for long.

At that moment, something completely unexpected happened. First of all, Sora's voice could clearly be heard, calling out Riku's name (and Kairi's, after seeing her slumped against a nearby house), followed shortly afterward by the boy's loud footsteps. And then, long before he could reach the two, there was a deep, echoing rush of air like a sonic boom. Kairi opened her eyes just in time to see a black blur slice clean through the enormous Hollow that had pinned Riku underfoot, splitting it into three even segments which slid off to one side or the other before dissolving into thin air just like all those Riku and herself had managed to destroy before had done. The wooden cart nearby was reduced to splinters in the process, showering Riku and the street around him with wooden shrapnel.

Then the black blur came to a stop. It was not entirely black, but not far off - its face was the only exception, being a pure white skull-like mask with two long horns curving and thrusting forward from it. It was smaller than the gigantic monster that it had just sliced apart, about the size of an adult human, but its lack of size certainly did not imply weakness; rather the opposite, it seemed as though a vast amount of power had been compressed into such a small space that it threatened to overflow and explode at any moment. Each arm was tipped with a long, curved blade rather than hands, as though it had been built with the sole purpose of attacking and destroying. Its chest had a hole in it like the others, but the hole seemed to be filled in with some mysterious substance, twisting and pulsating as it moved. It reminded Kairi of internal organs, and letting out a slight gasp at that thought, she slumped forward and fainted, causing her flowery Keyblade to vanish in a flash of light.

"It… it's gone," Riku muttered. "That thing that was just stomping on me… what happened?"

He pulled himself to his feet and glanced around. The newly-arrived Hollow was perfectly still and thus hidden from his sight; the only newcomer he saw along the street was Sora, Keyblade drawn and rushing toward him with eyes wide.

"Riku! Are you okay?"

The silver-haired boy shrugged.

"Yeah… I'm fine," he said. He turned slightly toward the other side of the street, then back to Sora. "Not so sure about Kairi, though… good thing you finished off that one for me, she's probably going to need…"

Sora's confused look caused Riku to trail off in the middle of his sentence. He turned and glanced up and down the street again before focusing back on Sora.

"Wait… you _were_ the one who got rid of that one, right?"

As if answering Riku's question for him, the black Hollow rushed at him - this time, he spotted the blur of its movement and raised his wing-shaped Keyblade just in time to deflect its attack, but the force of the clash stung his hands as he struggled to keep his grip on Way to the Dawn's handle. Though not yet able to see his attacker, Sora figured out what must have happened right away and countered with an attack of his own, but his Keyblade halted in midair as the Hollow's other blade-arm intercepted it. With a burst of strength, it flung its arms outward and sent both boys tumbling to the ground.

For just a moment, Riku spotted another blur of motion on one of the rooftops overhead. No, it was two blurs, though they were so close together that it had been hard to tell.

"Looks like the one you call 'White' found them," the silver-haired girl said. She turned toward her taller companion, expecting a disappointed expression on his face but instead finding that same inexplicable smile. She frowned slightly in response.

"I thought you wanted to look into the Keyblade's power further?"

His smile did not fade.

"Oh, I do… but there are other Keybearers," he said, "And besides… we haven't seen what _these_ Keybearers are truly capable of yet."

As they spoke, Sora and Riku both directed a flurry of simultaneous Keyblade-swings against their invisible (or, in Riku's case, barely-visible) opponent, which blocked each blow effortlessly before sending both scrambling to dodge when it unleashed a powerful beam of energy that leveled almost an entire city block behind them. They came away from the blast breathing heavily, their clothes lightly scorched around the edges and soaked with sweat; had such an attack landed a direct hit at point-blank range, even the power of their two Keyblades combined could not have saved them.

"Lord Aizen, you know just as well as I that 'White' will _destroy_ them," she said, clenching one of her fists at her side. "They've been struggling against ordinary Hollows just because they can't _see_ them. What chance do they have against an opponent like this?"

Aizen just smiled and watched, his expression unchanging as always.

"I suppose we shall see," he said, flashing out of sight for a moment and reappearing on another rooftop as a stray blast grazed the building he had been standing on previously, wiping half of the roof from existence in an instant.

His smaller companion flinched slightly but was unharmed as the outermost edges of the beam of energy roared past, just inches away from where she was standing. The Hollow they referred to as 'White' rushed between Sora and Riku just as they had regrouped from avoiding the previous blast, slashing at both of them but drawing blood only from Riku, whose dodge to the side was just a split-second too slow. He cried out in pain and took a swing with his Keyblade in retaliation, but struck nothing but air. Sora took a second to direct a healing spell his way, then charged his Keyblade with an aura of light, floating up off the ground for a moment before firing off a barrage of homing beams which made sharp turns in midair after White as the Hollow leaped and lunged from one spot to another in midair to avoid them. Most missed their mark, piercing holes through nearby buildings and shattering streetlamps on their way, but finally four of them managed to come after the Hollow from different directions all at once and hit home, triggering an explosion that made both of the boys shield their eyes to block out the light.

"However it turns out," he continued, following the movements of the two boys and the Hollow as they clashed over and over, both sides landing a hit or two occasionally now. "Whether the Keybearers manage to band together and overcome 'White' or they fail… it should be an interesting experiment, don't you think?"


	2. Explode This Body

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 2  
**

 _~ Explode This Body ~  
_

Sora and Riku were exhausted. Their clash with the invisible (or, from Riku's perspective, barely-visible) monster had gone on for quite a while now and it didn't seem like they were making any progress - no matter how many times they managed to land a solid blow on the creature, it always came back for more. Had Kairi still been conscious, she would have been able to point out to them that they had, in fact, managed to harm it... but every time, the breaks in its pitch-black armor would seal themselves back up within seconds, undoing every wound the Keyblade-wielders managed to inflict.

Eventually, Sora remembered how well his magic had worked on the other invisible monster he'd fought. While Riku blocked a series of blade-arm swings with his Keyblade, the spiky-haired boy hopped back away from the scene and prepared a spell, aiming his Keyblade in the direction of the battle and shouting the final word (partly to trigger the spell and partly to let Riku know that now was a good time to get out of its way.)

" _Blizzard!_ "

Just like before, a surge of ice and sub-zero winds rushed forth from the tip of the Keyblade; Riku caught wind of this attack and leaped out of its path, but the Hollow was not so lucky. For the first time, Sora could see the outline of its form quite clearly as ice surrounded it. He began to charge in to attack again, but before he could reach his target Riku reached out a hand and stopped him.

"Hold on," he said, watching the ice-sculpture that contained their enemy carefully for any sign of a change. He held his Keyblade out in the frozen monster's direction, and a pale blue glow began to form around it. "We can't win if we just keep on fighting like we've been doing."

Sora blinked. He wasn't sure what Riku was getting at.

"It's been over a year since I've needed it, but... I'm going to have to draw out the power of darkness again."

For a moment, Sora opened his mouth to object, but the words never came. The glow around Riku's weapon intensified into a concentrated aura of blue-purplish energy, which then expanded outward into a massive blade easily double the length of his Keyblade. The glow was so strong now that the familiar shape of the Way to the Dawn couldn't even be seen through it. Up on the rooftop where their unseen observers were watching the fight, Aizen's expression remained just as inscrutible as always, while his silver-haired companion's eyes went wide.

"What... what _is_ that!?"

Sora was wondering the same thing. He'd never seen Riku use this technique before; he figured it must have been one that he had developed during the year he spent unconscious in Castle Oblivion (or was he in that mansion in Twilight Town? He wasn't entirely sure where he'd been for that year, being unconscious and all), having his memories put back together again by Naminé. Riku glanced toward him for a moment, noting the confused look on his face and nodding slightly, but the sound of ice cracking prevented him from taking even a moment to explain. Moments later, the frozen Hollow let out a terrible roar and in an instant its icy prison shattered. Almost immediately, a sphere of energy began to form in between its horns, and Sora dove out of the way, knowing that another deadly energy blast was coming. Riku, on the other hand, did not make a move to dodge - instead, he swung the energy-blade that surrounded his weapon upward, slicing clean through both of the monster's horns in one swift movement.

White lurched back, howling in pain; the small sphere of energy that had begun to form between its horns suddenly exploded into a full-strength energy beam, launching high into the air (thankfully aimed away from either Sora or Riku at the time) and vanishing into the darkness of the night sky. Sora, still unable to see their opponent at all, could only guess that Riku's attack had succeeded.

"Looks like it won't be able to do _that_ again," Riku said, shifting his stance and preparing for another attack. "So now's our chance. We've got to hit this thing with everything we have, _now!_ "

Sora nodded, then lunged forward, delivering a Keyblade-thrust directly to the Hollow's midsection. It countered with an arm-swipe, but Riku's extended blade swooped in to block it just in time, giving Sora an opening to land a flurry of attacks that sent the Hollow toppling onto its back. Sora raised his Keyblade high into the air, gathering his magical energies for a moment before calling out a single word - " _Thunder!_ "

Just as the Hollow had managed to rise up from the ground once again, there was a flash from up above and a bolt of lightning came crashing down, striking it in the head and then surging throughout the rest of its body. Just like every other time one of the invisible monsters had been struck by magic, this briefly made its form clearly visible - and Riku took advantage of this by taking a swing directly at the joint of its left arm, his blade cleaving through a weak point in its armor and sending the severed limb clattering to the ground. It shrieked in response, but before it was able to launch a counterattack, Sora unleashed an attack of his own - once again, he had charged his Keyblade with light and sent it projecting outward as a swarm of small but powerful homing beams. This time, there wasn't enough distance between them for White to dodge - Riku jumped out of the way just in time as all of the many beams connected at once, triggering a massive explosion that knocked both of the Keyblade-wielders off of their feet.

When the smoke cleared and the two boys had pulled themselves upright again, all that remained was a series of craters in the ground; there was no sign of the Hollow. Riku breathed a sigh of relief and dismissed the energy-blade that had surrounded his weapon, causing it to fade into a slight glow for a few seconds before vanishing entirely. Sora wiped some sweat off his forehead and then glanced to Riku, flashing a grin.

"We got 'im... right?"

Riku nodded.

"Yeah... I think we got 'im," he said. He turned toward the other side of the street, where Kairi's unconscious body was still lying slumped against the building she had been thrown against earlier. "We'd better get Kairi out of here before any more of those things show up, though..."

Sora and Riku crossed the street, passing by the cratered section of pavement on their way to where Kairi was still lying unconscious. Sora was the first to reach her, standing by her side and looking down at her. He unsummoned his Keyblade in a flash of light and scratched his head, briefly wondering if she would wake up again soon or if they would have to carry her back home. He turned and glanced over at Riku, but just at that moment a sound of movement caught the silver-haired boy's attention and he turned around.

The first thing he noticed was that he could now see the monster more clearly than before - the shape of its body was visible even when it was not moving, or barely moving. Before he had a chance to wonder why, it took off in a mad rush across the street.

"Sora! It's headed straight for Kairi!"

Sora, of course, could not see White at all, regardless of whether the Hollow was moving or still. But the thought of Kairi, unconscious and helpless, being targeted by the creature made him leap into action without even thinking. He took a single quick step and turned, blocking the way to Kairi with arms spread wide. And then, before he could even think to summon his Keyblade, the Hollow struck. Riku watched, frozen by fear as the shape of the skull-like mask that covered its face opened wide, then clamped down on Sora's shoulder after letting out a horrible shriek. The armored shoulderpad was of no use; the Hollow's fangs sliced through it like a hot knife through butter, plunging into Sora's body and almost immediately soaking his shirt with fresh blood. The spiky-haired boy's eyes widened and, almost echoing the Hollow's howl that preceded it, he screamed.

Riku called forth his Keyblade again and lunged in for an attack, but before he got within reach of the Hollow, Sora had lowered his hands and summoned his own Keyblade. The weapon's silvery metallic shaft materialized from the handle upward, plunging straight through the pulsating material that had filled in the Hollow's hole. Immediately there was a reaction; Riku saw the bulge starting to form along the monster's back right away, though he had no way of telling that it was not made up of the same substance as the rest of the creature's body. Up on the rooftops overhead, Aizen placed one hand on his companion's shoulder and motioned that they should move.

"What's going on now? What _is_ this!?"

"It's simple," Aizen said, adjusting his glasses so that the bright glow that was beginning to shine from the pulsing sphere of innards reflected eerily off of their lenses. "The Keybearer, either knowingly or by a stroke of blind luck, has triggered White's self-destruct mechanism."

" _SELF-DESTRUCT!?_ ", the silver-haired girl shouted, eyes widening. She yanked herself away from Aizen and glared at him, though she couldn't actually see his eyes through the reflection in his glasses. "You mean that thing's going to..."

Aizen just nodded, and in a flash he was gone, leaping with superhuman speed to another rooftop at a safe distance. His companion remained for a moment, but then followed shortly after, taking several flash-steps to cover the same distance that Aizen had managed in just one. Unbeknownst to either of the two watchers, Riku's perception of souls was rapidly growing stronger as he spent more time in the company of Hollows; when she had shouted at the top of her lungs about the self-destruct mechanism, Aizen had not been the only one who had heard. Surrounding his weapon with the massive blade-like aura once again, he charged forward and pierced the Hollow's head with a powerful thrust, loosening its grip on Sora just enough that he was able to pull him away from it. As the sphere of twisting, pulsating internals behind White's body rose ever higher and glowed ever brighter from within, Riku pulled Sora into a more-protected position behind himself (yanking the Keyblade out from the hole in the process) and concentrated, causing an aura of purplish-black dark energy to swirl up around his feet.

"Looks like that thing's going to blow any moment now," he said to himself.

He dematerialized his Keyblade and raised one hand out in front of him, palm facing outward, and then closed his eyes, lowering his head almost as if in prayer. The Hollow's self-destruct device was now strained almost to its breaking point, the sphere hanging over its body bloated to nearly the size of a small house. There was no time for Riku, let alone the seriously wounded Sora and unconscious Kairi, to escape from the blast that was about to break loose.

"Well," Riku muttered, a swirl of darkness surrounding his entire body. "Let's hope this works."


	3. Shelter From the Storm

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 3  
**

 _~ Shelter From the Storm ~  
_

Aizen and his silver-haired companion watched as the pulsating sphere of innards reached its breaking point, cracking open and allowing a torrent of energy to spill out in all directions. First it roared upward, rising high above the city skyline; then, expanding outward from the tower of flame-like energy that became its epicenter, the blast spread across three square blocks, incinerating everything in its path. The two (mostly) silent observers had to flash-step to another rooftop in order to keep outside the blast's range - it seemed that the self-destruct device had been more powerful than even Aizen had predicted.

The two watched for several moments afterward as the explosion faded and a billowing tower of smoke began to rise up over the city. White itself had certainly been destroyed in the blast, as that was the purpose of the artificially-created Hollow having a self-destruct mechanism in the first place - to eliminate all evidence of its existence if, by chance, someone managed to defeat it in battle. That way, there was no possibility of it being traced back to its creator, or of anyone else learning the secrets of the method used to create it.

"The Keybearers," Aizen said, turning to his companion, who was staring in shock at the degree of destruction that White's explosion had wrought. "Surely they did not survive such an explosion... correct?"

She shivered for a moment, then closed her eyes and concentrated. She could still sense their three hearts, but the pulse was faint; she could only assume what she was sensing was three disembodied hearts, drifting off on the wind now that the bodies they were formerly housed in had been vaporized by the blast. She opened her eyes, paused for a moment, and then answered Aizen's question with a quick nod.

"No... they're all dead. There's no doubt in my mind."

This, of course, was a lie. There most certainly _was_ a glimmer of doubt in her mind, a thought that maybe one of the three had managed something at the last second that had saved their lives, and that the faint pulse of their hearts' energy was only a lingering echo of their power left behind after they had escaped the area in that last instant before detonation. It had to be the silver-haired one, she thought; the redhead was out cold at the time of the blast and the brunette was clearly incompetent - not to mention wounded. That thought took root somewhere in her mind and grew from there; within moments she was imagining all sorts of possibilities of how the silver-haired boy could have slipped out of the situation at the last moment, living to fight another day. Perhaps they'd even meet again.

Aizen crouched down slightly and looked her in the eyes.

"No doubt, perhaps," he said, "But it seems you certainly have _something_ on your mind. This is no time for daydreaming. An explosion like that is bound to attract plenty of attention, after all..."

A glowing white vertical line began to trace itself in the air several yards away, and she jumped slightly at the sight of it. A Senkaimon - the gateway to the Soul Society - was opening, and she knew what that meant... other Soul Reapers had been dispatched to investigate. Aizen nodded and gave her a slight wave, and immediately she was flash-stepping away at full speed, leaping from one rooftop to another in a hurry to flee the scene before she was seen in Aizen's company.

Moments later, two black-garbed warriors emerged from the Senkaimon, rushing over to Aizen's position and giving him a quick bow as they noticed him glancing in their direction out of the corner of his eye. Neither wore the white cloak that signified a captain's rank, though one of the two did have a lieutenant's badge displayed on her upper sleeve.

"Captain Aizen! Are you okay?"

"What the hell happened down here?"

Aizen turned toward them, the slight smile on his face fading to a more serious look.

"An immensely powerful Hollow of unknown origin appeared here earlier tonight," he said, motioning toward the smoking crater that had been blasted out from the center of the city. "Possibly the same one that killed the Soul Reaper assigned to watch over this world. I tracked its movements for nearly an hour, but before I could move in to destroy it myself... it attacked three humans who possessed an unusual power."

One of the two officers stared out across the crater, mouth gaping open. He pointed at the destroyed landscape, jabbing his finger at each of the partially-wrecked buildings on the outer edges for emphasis.

"Three humans? Three humans did _this?_ "

Aizen shook his head.

"No. That was the Hollow's doing… as soon as one of the three managed to damage it, something highly unusual happened and it exploded."

The smaller and younger of the two went wide-eyed, her mouth gaping open a bit in shock.

"The Hollow… exploded…"

"Never heard of _that_ happening before. Whaddya think caused it?"

Aizen sighed.

"I'm not entirely sure," he said, "But something was certainly _different_ about this Hollow. Its hole was filled in with some unknown substance which seemed to be the source of the explosion. If I had to guess… I would say someone highly skilled in the ways of modifying souls had tampered with it."

The larger of the two other Soul Reapers growled and scratched his bald head slightly.

"Damn… this better not be another one of Captain Kurotsuchi's projects that 'accidentally' escaped the lab…"

Aizen smiled.

"I have no reason to suspect one of _our_ ranks would be involved with such things," he said, adjusting his glasses in such a way that the reflected light of the moon obscured his eyes for just a moment. "No… whoever created this Hollow was most certainly someone with no regard for the rules of Soul Society."

* * *

The next thing Riku knew, he found himself waking up on an unfamiliar bed in a building he didn't recognize. The last thing he remembered was generating a dark barrier the moment before the monster he and Sora were fighting had exploded; the familiar purple aura swirled up around himself, Sora, and Kairi, filling in with a pattern of brightly-glowing purple hexagons as the explosion rushed past them and - at first, anyway - managing to shield them from its wrath. But then, a crack began to form in the barrier. He had pumped more and more of his power into it, but the cracks continued to spread, and eventually it gave out and shattered. He was thrown to the ground, and then everything went black.

" _That blast was enormous… it had to have destroyed_ everything _out there,_ " he thought. " _So how did_ I _survive?_ "

Just as he had begun to make his first attempt at getting up out of the bed, a tall shadow of a cloaked man loomed over him. For a moment, he tensed up; then, just as suddenly as the shadowy figure had appeared, the lights in the room switched on and the cloaked man standing over him whipped out a paper fan from one of his pockets and began casually waving it in front of his face.

"Ooh, lemme guess," he began, "You're _probably_ wondering how you're alive right now."

Riku paused for a moment, slumping out of the half-upright position he had managed to pull himself into and sighing.

"Yeah."

The strange man hovering by his bedside chuckled slightly.

"You shouldn't be surprised, really," he said. "That shield technique was pretty impressive, all things considered. I wouldn't have expected it to hold out as long as it did."

He paced about the room, his shoes making an odd wooden trotting sound as he went.

"Of course, I happened to get there just in time to see it all happen… or see it all end, to be exact. And what else is someone supposed to do with three injured kids but take them in and nurse them back to health?"

Riku sat upright again, taking a good look at the man standing before him. He wore a dark green (it looked almost black in the dim light) cloak over clothes of a similar but lighter color, with messy blonde hair and a green-and-white striped bucket hat on top that shaded his face. The odd trotting footsteps were caused by his shoes, an unusual old style of Japanese sandals with wooden pegs sticking out from the bottom. Riku had never seen anyone but Sora's father ever wear them before, and even then only as part of certain holiday celebrations… usually after partaking in quite a bit of alcohol, which apparently made walking in them a bit difficult if Sora's dad was anything to go by.

"Well, you could've dropped us off at a hospital instead of… wherever this is," he muttered. "Who _are_ you, anyway?"

"Oh, I'm just a perfectly ordinary - albeit _extraordinarily_ handsome - shopkeeper," he said. He waved the fan a few times and laughed, then pointed to the wall on the other side of the room. "And this, of course, is the storage room."

Riku glanced around, noticing for the first time that the rest of the room was packed full of crates with various candy logos stamped across them. The "bed" he was lying in was, in fact, little more than three of those crates with some blankets and a pillow on top of it. He groaned and slumped back down onto the pillow (which, as he was just realizing, was the only remotely comfortable part of this "bed") once again.

"Lemme guess," Riku said, "The others got real beds."

The shopkeeper nodded.

"And very comfortable ones," he said. Riku frowned and attempted to bury the back of his head further into the pillow, with little success. "After all, they _were_ in worse shape than you when I brought the three of you here."

Riku shot upright.

"What about now? Are Sora and Kairi okay?"

Once again, the shopkeeper just nodded, his hand-held fan blocking his expression completely.

"I'm expecting a full recovery any day now. Kairi's doing very well - she woke up before you, by the way. Nice girl, she filled me in on everything that happened last night. Sora, though…"

He lowered the fan for the first time, tilting his head so that the shadow of his hat over his eyes deepened even further and revealing a deadly serious expression that almost startled Riku with its stark contrast to the goofy, laid-back personality that the Keybearers' mysterious rescuer had been showing up to this point.

"He might be… a little tired when he comes around. You two make sure to keep an eye on him for me. Stay close to him - Kairi especially. And… I'd suggest not letting him run around at night on his own for a while."

He tossed the fan into the air, caught it with his other hand, and reached into one of his cloak's pockets, rummaging around for a moment before pulling out what appeared to be a business card. He tossed it to Riku with surprising speed, and the silver-haired boy just barely managed to catch it before it went spinning past his makeshift bed. Based on the way the palm of his hand stung afterward, he wouldn't have been surprised if it had embedded itself in the wall behind him like a ninja star if he hadn't caught it first.

"My number's right there on the back," the shopkeeper said, turning and walking out of the room while waving over his shoulder. "Give me a call if anything about your friend seems… _different_."


	4. Creeping Shadows

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 4  
**

 _~ Creeping Shadows ~  
_

In the days that followed, Sora, Riku, and Kairi went back to their normal lives - attending school, doing homework, hanging around town doing the usual teenager-ish things with their friends, and making occasional visits to the island where they had always played as kids when they had time off from other things. Riku had even started a part-time job now, helping out his father on his fishing boat on the weekends. None of them really questioned the fact that their lives had been saved by Kisuke Urahara, the eccentric owner of a little candy shop on the edge of town, who only Kairi had ever met before that night. In fact, they rarely thought about what had happened earlier that week at all once they had gotten back into their usual routines. They had each traveled to other worlds, fought alongside bipedal dogs and ducks and giant mice that lived in a castle, traveled through portals of swirling darkness, and had their hearts removed from their bodies; the thought of a guy who owned a candy shop secretly having the ability to patch up a few wounded kids overnight wasn't too "out there" in comparison.

But, of course, things couldn't just stay normal for them. The rumors of strange sounds and disappearances continued; if anything, it seemed that the rate of these reports was _increasing_. The three Keybearers had initially thought that the black-coated, blade-armed Hollow they had narrowly managed to defeat must have been the source of the infestation, but based on everything they were hearing now, that was most certainly not the case.

"Okay," Sora said, turning abruptly to his two friends while they were walking home from school one day. He began to walk backwards as he spoke, and immediately Kairi rolled her eyes; she just knew this wasn't going to end well. "How about this… every night, whoever has the least homework should go track down these things and get rid of them. I mean, somebody has to do something, right?"

Kairi nodded slightly.

"I like it," she said. "We can't just let them keep snatching people off the streets, after all."

Thinking back to Urahara's warnings for the first time since he had left that storage room in the back of the shop, Riku paused for a moment and frowned.

"Yeah, but..."

Just as Riku began to speak, Sora made a slight misstep, stumbling over a crack in the sidewalk and tumbling over backward. Riku and Kairi both sighed, with the redhead actually slapping her hand to her forehead in annoyance. Once the spiky-haired brunette was back on his feet, Riku continued where he left off.

"...I don't think it'd be a good idea for you to be out there fighting alone," he continued. "I mean, you can't even _see_ them."

Sora scratched his head for a moment and shrugged.

"Well, I managed to take out that first one on my own, so-"

"No way," Riku interrupted. "I can see them pretty well now, so I should be fine on my own, but you'll need somebody who can see them clearly to keep up. How about this… since Kairi's ahead of us in every subject now that the two of us've missed so much school, she'll head out with you whenever it's your turn."

Kairi gave a disapproving look, opening her mouth to object for a moment, but then stopped herself before managing to get out so much as a single word. Missing a few questions on a test every now and then was nowhere near as bad as the possibility that Sora might get hurt again just because she was too busy studying to be there with him, after all. The look on her face faded and she stood alongside Riku, nodding in agreement. Sora let out a defeated sigh and then begrudgingly nodded back.

"Well… I guess that's settled, then," he said, tightening the straps on his school backpack and turning to head down the street. "Hey, you guys want to come over for supper? Mom always cooks way too much, so we're bound to have enough for two more."

Riku laughed; this was a slight exaggeration, but he didn't mind ending up with only maybe half a meal's worth of food if it meant getting to eat something other than his own father's usual dinner of fish and rice for once.

* * *

Far away, even beyond the veil that separated the realms of the living and the dead, a group of black-clad Soul Reapers had gathered in a meeting room. The decor of the room was of an older style, very traditional, and very Japanese; as those with white cloaks that signified Captain status entered the room, the lower-ranking officers each gave a quick respectful bow. As the last of the group entered the room and the doors swung shut behind them, the ancient, bearded man at the back of the room spoke.

"Captain Kurotsuchi of Squad Twelve," he began, tapping his cane on the floor in such a way that all idle chatter in the room immediately stopped. "What has your research determined?"

The twelfth captain, a man with a bizarre painted face and even stranger headgear, took a step forward and addressed the entire group.

"As I'm sure you are all well aware by now," he said, strange yellow eyes glancing about the room and passing over every other Soul Reaper as he spoke, "The world of the living has been suffering from an explosive growth in Hollow population over the last year. Scattered reports have even come in of _Menos-level_ Hollows surfacing in the living realm, which has been all but unheard of in this century."

Some of the lower-ranking officers gasped; in their entire time as Soul Reapers, they had never seen a Menos outside of textbooks back at the academy.

"Now, on to the cause. I have been able to determine that the rise in Hollow population began exactly one year and two months ago. With a bit of research into the living world's history, I've found that this matches up precisely with the date that a group known as 'Organization XIII' was defeated by a band of human warriors using an ancient weapon known as the 'Keyblade.'"

Several of the older captains' eyes widened. A woman with dark hair tied in a long braid that hung down in front of her chest frowned slightly, the usual pleasant smile on her face fading instantly at the sound of Captain Kurotsuchi's words. Even the old man at the far end of the room, ranked as Head Captain over all thirteen squads, raised his head slightly at the mention of that word - _Keyblade._ It was a term that those who had memories of the great war a thousand years past knew very well.

"The Keyblade, huh?", a man cloaked in an oversized flowery pink kimono mused. "Didn't think I'd hear _that_ name again so soon."

"I thought they had all been lost or destroyed in the Keyblade War," a white-haired man said, turning toward the pink-clad one. Both had a rather worried expression on their faces, though in the case of the white-haired one it showed far more clearly. "Could someone have uncovered the ancient methods of creating them again, or..."

Before long, chattering between the officers had started up once again. The younger Soul Reapers had never heard of Keyblades, and were asking their captains, some of whom were no more informed on the topic than their subordinates. The white-haired man was explaining in a hushed whisper to a small girl with pitch-black hair, whose already large eyes widened even further as she was told the story of the Keyblade War that caused the original, complete World to be split into the many smaller worlds that exist today - and this was not the watered-down version of the story passed on as a fairy-tale to children in the living world, but something much closer to the truth of what had happened. The twelfth captain glanced around the room, growing a bit impatient at the noise preventing him from finishing his report and going back to the laboratory to further his research.

Finally, Head Captain Yamamoto tapped his cane against the floor, the echoing wooden sound causing conversations to stumble in mid-sentence.

"Enough!", he called out, waiting for total silence before motioning to the twelfth captain to continue.

"Yes, as I was saying… 'Organization XIII' was a group made up of entities that humans have taken to calling 'Nobodies' - living beings who have lost their hearts. While the uppermost ranks of this Organization were only thirteen individuals, much like our captains, it was not merely these thirteen who were eliminated in the conflict."

He pressed a button on some device he had apparently been holding the entire time, and a holographic image flickered to life in front of him, enlarging to a size where everyone in the room could see.

"According to my research so far, hundreds if not _thousands_ of lesser Nobodies also met their end at the hands of the Keybearers. And, as I'm sure you all know… one of the final steps in the process of a soul's transformation into a Hollow is the loss of its heart."

The chart, which had previously shown several twisted, silvery-gray colored Nobody creatures, soon became filled with Hollows of all shapes and sizes as the Nobodies were crossed off.

"Each and every Nobody that died in that conflict would have almost certainly become a Hollow if its soul was not attended to within a period of less than a month. And, as most of these Nobodies already possessed greater spiritual power than ordinary humans, it follows that the resulting Hollows would likewise be abnormally powerful. The current Hollow surge is not merely a problem of numbers, but of increased strength as well."

* * *

Sora paused to catch his breath for a moment, then jumped slightly as an unearthly shriek reached his ears - it was somewhere close by, going by the sound of it. Though he still couldn't see the invisible monsters the way Riku and Kairi could, he could certainly _hear_ them, and on rare occasions he thought he could just barely catch a blur of movement out of the corners of his eyes when they were nearby. He and Kairi had ventured out into the streets for their first night of tracking down the creatures, which he now knew were called "Hollows" - Kairi had filled him in on this fact, apparently hearing Urahara refer to them by that name after she had regained consciousness.

Earlier that night, they had encountered a gang of smaller Hollows, climbing about on the walls of buildings and peering in through the windows. Just as one had apparently decided to smash its way through the window in order to go after someone inside, Sora and Kairi launched their attack - Kairi would point out where each Hollow was, and then Sora would fling his Keyblade up at them like a boomerang, striking every last one of them one after the other as it spun through the air before returning to his hand. Once they had fallen to the ground, they were easy targets; apparently, these smaller Hollows weren't nearly as strong as the ones they had fought during their first encounter with the creatures, and it wasn't long before they were cleared out.

"Sora!", Kairi called out, just spotting a new Hollow that seemed to have appeared out of thin air. "Right behind you!"

This one, however, seemed to be a bit more troublesome. Though Sora blocked its first strike with his Keyblade, it quickly attacked again, claws narrowly missing and ripping a chunk of cloth free from the side of his jacket. The spiky-haired boy dodged again and again, not quite able to see exactly where the blows were coming from but managing to slip out of their path just in time as he felt the wind from their movement; finally, when there seemed to be a pause in the attacks, he lunged forward with his Keyblade.

"Above you!"

Sora's Keyblade thrust missed by a mile, of course - the Hollow had taken flight, flapping its weird gray featherless-bird wings rapidly and generating a low-pitched hum as it passed over Sora's head. He turned and flung his Keyblade into the air overhead, but the Hollow swerved out of the way. He glanced over to Kairi, who pointed in the direction of a lamppost, and with a quick hand movement he directed the Keyblade to turn in midair and go veering off in that direction. With a _thud_ and a shriek, the Hollow was knocked off balance and came tumbling to the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust and small rocks as it crashed into the sidewalk.

"Gotcha!"

Sora let out a battle cry and took off running across the street, jumping toward the last known location of the Hollow... and then being sent flying by a sudden rush of wind as its wings began to beat even faster. As he tumbled onto his back and attempted to stand once again, the Hollow made a charge of its own, ending up right on top of Sora in a matter of moments. Before he could even attempt to stand, he felt its claws digging into both of his shoulders; the Hollow had latched onto him and was now dragging him across the surface of the road at ever-increasing speeds. Sora ended up being carried along half a city block before the Hollow's movement suddenly stopped - Kairi had caught up with the two of them and plunged her own Keyblade through the monster's skull-masked face, splitting the beak-like protrusion on the front clean in half. With one last choked shriek, it dissolved away into the darkness of the night, freeing Sora from its grasp.

"Whew," Sora sighed, dematerializing his Keyblade and scratching his head. He glanced down at his ruined clothes, laughing slightly. "Looks like you saved me again there. I'm gonna need to get a new jacket after that one..."

Kairi barely held back a laugh of her own at the sight of Sora removing his now-shredded jacket, holding it out with one hand and letting it dangle to the ground.

"That reminds me," he said, draping what was left of the jacket over his shoulder. "I've been having these weird dreams lately…"

Kairi raised an eyebrow.

"Really? You have dreams about getting your jacket torn up?"

Sora cracked up laughing.

"No, not the jacket!", he said, pausing for a moment to fight off the lingering giggles before continuing. "It was how you jumped in to finish off that Hollow that reminded me."

He walked over to the nearest sidewalk and sat down on the curb, laying back and staring up at the stars overhead. Before long, Kairi had joined him, sitting barely a foot away.

"It's been almost every night since we left Urahara's shop," he began to explain. "It's the same dream every time, just one or two little things change from one night to the next. A Hollow's chasing me, and I'm completely helpless… but then, right at the last minute, you always step in and scare it away."


	5. Black and White

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 5  
**

 _~ Black and White ~  
_

The first week of their new duties as part-time Hollow exterminators for the city of Innenjima was relatively uneventful for Sora, Riku, and Kairi. In comparison to some of their past adventures, this was practically a peacetime situation. Sora still got hit plenty of times due to his inability to clearly _see_ his opponents, so he ended up with bruises and scrapes and torn clothing more often than his mother would've liked (and had to come up with some pretty impressive stories to explain all these minor injuries away), but none of the Hollows they had encountered up to this point had been powerful enough to overwhelm the Keybearers, even when only one or two of them were present. On top of that, Sora's ability to detect them was slowly but surely improving; within a week's time, he had gone from only being able to hear them to being able to see movements occasionally to being able to see a fuzzy, translucent shape where they stood.

Riku sat atop a roof near the center of the city, surveying several nearby streets from his perch as he thought about how things had gone so far. He wasn't far away from the scene of their first battle against the Hollows; three whole city blocks had been reduced to a rubble-filled crater in the explosion that night, and even a week later the investigation into what had happened was practically the only thing on the news. Some were afraid that a small nuclear bomb had been set off by some terrorist group or a meteorite had come crashing down, while others wondered if a gas line might have exploded and a rare few who were a bit more well-informed suspected a magic spell gone wrong. One thing Riku had noticed was that Hollows seemed to be drawn to this area now, though as of yet had he hadn't fully realized the reason why. Whatever the reason, it made the job of tracking them down a bit easier, so he wasn't going to complain.

As he gazed out across the massive crater that now took the place of a small residential district and a handful of old, abandoned storefronts, he spotted the dark shape of what appeared to be a very young girl walking alone through the abandoned area. He blinked, then glanced back and found that she was gone.

"Okay," he muttered to himself, "Either I'm seeing things, or…"

A sound from behind him caused him to snap to attention, and he turned around… only to find that the metallic _thump_ was nothing more than the old air-conditioning system in the building below him kicking on, the ventilation fans on the roof outside slowly beginning to turn. Sighing and shaking his head, he turned back toward the city, glancing down an empty street that was just outside the destroyed area… and spotted the little girl again, standing in the light of a streetlamp as clear as day. Her clothes and hair were both pitch black, making a sharp contrast with her pale skin. She stood there for a few moments, then casually walked off down the street, occasionally looking to one side or the other as if searching for something.

" _Doesn't look familiar,_ " he thought to himself as he watched her movements, " _And those clothes… a little early for Halloween. Something tells me she's not from around here._ "

As quickly and silently as possible, Riku walked to the edge of the roof and then climbed down, hopping off after sliding over a canvas overhang and landing on the sidewalk below. He ducked into an alley, vanishing from sight just in time to avoid the gaze of the girl as she turned in his direction.

When she turned and started walking again, Riku left the safety of the alley and crept along on the other side of the street, keeping far enough away that she couldn't hear his footsteps but getting gradually closer. After a few minutes of this, something caught his eye that made him abandon stealth immediately - a Hollow beginning to appear behind the girl, its skeletal masked face seeming to fade into view from the surrounding air and the rest of its body following afterward. At the moment it started to appear, the girl suddenly halted, looking around but not checking directly behind her; Riku took this chance to take off running in her direction.

"Hey you! Little girl!", he shouted, calling forth his Keyblade in a flash of purplish light as he went, "It's not safe out here at night - you'd better get home!"

The girl turned toward him, an annoyed look on her face - though this was quickly replaced with shock as she noticed the Hollow that now stood just a few feet behind her. Riku shifted his Keyblade in his hands as he got close, but before he had a chance to strike, something completely unexpected happened.

The seemingly helpless girl proved that she was anything _but_ helpless, drawing a katana from the (previously unnoticed) sheath hanging from the left side of her belt and swiftly slicing off one of the Hollow's arms long before it could come anywhere near touching her. As it roared and pulled back its other arm for a counterattack, she jumped high into the air, easily clearing the monster's height in an instant and completely avoiding its punch. As she came down, her blade sliced cleanly through the Hollow's mask and continued down until its entire body had split in two, causing it to dissipate instantly. Riku just stood and stared, not sure what to make of what he was seeing. She closed her eyes and bowed slightly, almost as if saying a prayer for the departed monster, and then sheathed her sword.

"I guess you can see them, too," Riku said, blurting out the first thing that came to mind. He quickly unsummoned his Keyblade before she could ask any questions about it, still not sure what to think of this newcomer. "Who _are_ you, anyway?"

"My name isn't 'little girl,' for one thing," she snapped, putting her hands on her hips and glaring up at him. "It's Rukia Kuchiki - and I'm probably ten times your age, so if anyone's 'little' here it's…"

She paused for a moment, staring at Riku with an odd look on her face. Only just now was she noticing that she couldn't really sense any spiritual power from the silver-haired boy standing in front of her - at least, not much more than what any ordinary living person might have.

"Wait… _you_ can see me?"

Riku gave her an odd look.

"What, were you expecting to blend in with the shadows since you're wearing so much black or something? Maybe try a hooded cloak next time."

Rukia glared at him again.

"It's not that, you idiot," she snapped. "I'm the Soul Reaper assigned to watch over this city and fight off any Hollows that appear. Ordinary people aren't supposed to be able to see spirits like Soul Reapers or Hollows…"

Riku laughed.

"Oh, believe me," he said, "I'm not exactly what most people would call 'ordinary' at this point."

"I'm barely sensing any spiritual power from you at all," she said, screwing her eyes shut for a moment to focus in on his energy signature in an attempt to see if there was something she had missed before. "It's weird… you _shouldn't_ be able to see me."

"And yet here you are," he said, reaching out one hand and patting her lightly on the head, "Not any more invisible than…"

Riku paused for a moment. It was only just now that he realized that the Hollow that Rukia had eliminated just now wasn't just a blurry silhouette to him; he could actually _see_ it this time, skull-mask and all, clearer than ever before. Up until now he had simply been imagining what they must have looked like based on Kairi's descriptions of the ones they had encountered that first night, but now he could see everything for himself. He was abruptly snapped out of his thoughts when Rukia wrenched his arm away from the top of her head with a surprising amount of strength, gripping him in something resembling a judo hold and then slamming him into the ground.

"Okay, enough of this," she said, pinning his arm in a rather uncomfortable way, "Tell me who you are."

Riku gritted his teeth, then with a burst of strength overwhelmed the black-clad girl and broke out of her hold, sending her tumbling onto her back. He summoned his Keyblade once again, holding it just inches from her chest before she managed to stand.

"My name's Riku Hashimoto," he said, "And this city is _my_ home. My friends and I've been protecting it from Hollows for more than a week now, ever since we found out about them. Where've _you_ been all that time?"

Rukia sighed.

"I was just assigned to this world today. It's never been a hotbed of Hollow activity until this summer... there wasn't even a full-time Soul Reaper assigned here until then. But after what happened to the last one..."

Riku pulled his weapon back a bit, giving Rukia room to sit upright.

"What happened to the last one?"

"Killed in action," she replied. "And there's a rumor going around that the Hollow that killed him... wasn't normal. That's why they chose me."

She stood, and though Riku kept his Keyblade at the ready he made no move to stop her. Rukia didn't seem to be dangerous as far as he could tell, despite her initially hostile reaction to his presence; at the very least, she didn't seem like an active threat to anyone but the Hollows, and they probably didn't quite count as "someone" anymore.

"I've been told I could easily become a seated officer," she continued. "My squad's captain is even convinced I could be a _lieutenant_. But..."

The conversation was abruptly cut short by a sound of deep-voiced, psychotic laughter that seemed to echo from all around them. A moment later, the form of a large Hollow began to come into view, phasing into the space in front of them as if it were moving in through some other dimension. The laughter continued, but now its source was visible - the mask on this one's face was like a demonic clown, and a mane of wild red hair spread out from it in all directions, obscuring most of the creature's body.

"Another Hollow," Rukia said, eyes narowing at the sight of it.

One of her hands had already shot down and grasped the hilt of her sword; this was clearly a situation she had seen before. For a moment, she turned toward Riku; noticing that he, too, had shifted into a battle-ready position she just nodded without saying a word and focused her attention back toward their mutual enemy.

"Ooh, a meal _and_ a side dish!", the Hollow cackled, opening the mouth on its skull-mask wide and grinning down at the two of them. Its tongue flopped out from between its teeth and a single drop of drool fell, sizzling like acid as it touched the pavement. "And even better, they're not just more bland, boring human souls! But which one should I have first?"

Riku blinked.

"Wait… since when can these things _talk?_ "

"Most of them can't," Rukia said, keeping a close eye on the Hollow as it remained in the same position, tongue lolling out and drooling as it gazed at the two, eyes rapidly moving from one to the other. "Most Hollows are driven by pure instinct - they can't even really _think,_ let alone talk. And if they _do_ say anything, it's just incoherent nonsense. For an ordinary Hollow to speak like this… it must have been a truly evil person even _before_ death."

"Who're you calling _ordinary?_ " the Hollow said, suddenly stretching upward until it towered over the two.

The frizzy red hair that spilled out from around its mask now only covered its neck and shoulders; the rest of its body was pale-skinned and lanky, with unnaturally long arms and legs, ending with weird curling toes like those you'd expect to see on a pair of shoes for an elf or genie. Its chest was so narrow that there was barely even enough space to fit the enormous gaping hole that all Hollows shared. Apparently, the monster had been contorted inward on itself in order to fit its entire body under the cloak of its hair before, but now was visible in its full grotesque glory.

"Maybe _you_ wouldn't know," the Hollow said, glancing at Rukia for a moment before focusing its gaze on Riku. "But you, boy… I'm sure _you've_ heard my name before. You were around ten years ago, weren't ya? Tell me… does the name 'Jackknife' Mack ring a bell?"

Riku flinched so visibly that even Rukia, whose eyes were still firmly focused on the Hollow, noticed right away. Memories of Riku's childhood suddenly flooded into his head - and they were not good memories. When he was only seven years old, his mother had gone missing and had been found dead in an alley not far away from their home, all of her money stolen and her other possessions strewn across the alley. Months later, the culprit was finally identified - a man named Makkuro Akabashi, better known as the robber turned serial murderer that the newspapers had taken to calling 'Jackknife' Mack. Mack had been sent to prison and later executed, and over the years all memory of him had faded from Riku's mind - he'd been caught by the long arm of the law and punished for what he'd done, so there was no need to waste any more thought on someone who'd sunk as low as him. But now, seeing the notorious killer sink even lower, transformed into a Hollow monstrosity years after his death, made all those thoughts come flooding back.

"He's strong for a normal Hollow," Rukia said, shifting her stance and beginning to draw her sword. The Hollow's spiritual pressure was radiating outward now, washing over her in waves and causing a few beads of sweat to break out on her forehead; this was easily the most dangerous Hollow she had ever faced in battle. "A lot stronger than I was expecting… what do you say we work together on this one?"

Riku didn't even look in her direction, merely holding out one hand in front of her while gripping his Keyblade's handle tightly in the other as he raised his head to stare the Hollow right in the face. The tiny black pupils in the centers of its glowing yellow eyes rattled around for a moment before focusing right back down at the silver-haired boy.

"No," he said, stepping out in front of Rukia and taking another step toward the Hollow as he grasped his Keyblade in both hands. A raging, flame-like aura of darkness had already begun to form at his feet, kicking up a slight wind that ruffled the loose sleeves and pants of the Soul Reaper's uniform.

"As long as I'm still breathing, all you have to do is sit back and watch. This one's mine."


	6. Mack the Knife

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 6  
**

 _~ Mack the Knife ~_

It had been a night full of surprises for Rukia Kuchiki - certainly not what she had been expecting from the very first night of her full-time assignment in the living world. First she had encountered Riku, a human who possessed no spiritual power but could still see her and even call forth some unknown weapon. Now, one of the most powerful Hollows she had ever encountered was looming over her, and yet she was just standing back and watching as the silver-haired boy prepared to take it down by himself.

The Hollow that was once "Jackknife" Mack pulled his tongue back into his mouth and grinned, then lurched forward and swung one arm to the side. Riku dashed closer to the Hollow, slipping underneath the extended arm and ending up out in the street behind him, while Rukia was forced to jump out of the way of the attack as his arm stretched out even further a moment before impact, the clawed hand tearing through the storefronts behind where she had been standing and sending broken glass and bricks flying everywhere. Riku took a swing at the Hollow from behind, but he bent his body out of the path of the weapon just in time. A split-second later, Mack snapped back like a rubber band, slamming the side of his torso into Riku and sending him tumbling back into the street. Twisting around and taking at look at him, the Hollow burst out laughing once again.

"Sure you don't want her help, boy?"

Riku stood and just glared up at the monster in response, raising his Keyblade in a different stance than before. He lunged and slashed at the Hollow, but he contorted out of the path of the incoming attack once again. This time, however, Riku hopped back just in time to avoid the rubber-band-like snap that followed... and then rushed forward, slashing across the Hollow's leg as he passed. The Hollow spun his upper body around, swinging both arms outward as it went, but Riku backflipped over the first swing and ducked under the second. Just as his opponent's body had twisted back into a position where it was facing him, he removed one hand from his Keyblade and aimed it right at the demonic clown's face.

"From what I can see," Riku said, "You're the one who's going to need help."

Before the Hollow could react, a sphere of purplish, flame-like dark energy had flared into existence around his hand and then shot forward, slamming into Mack's face and setting off an explosion that sent him crashing to the street, arms and legs sprawling out in all different directions. Riku jumped toward him, preparing to drive his Keyblade through the Hollow's skull as he came down, but as he came closer Mack's legs and arms tightened up and coiled in on themselves like springs; a moment before impact, the Hollow uncoiled his legs and sent himself flying backward across the street with surprising speed, flipping several times in midair and then latching onto the side of one of the larger buildings nearby. He clung to the wall for a moment, watching as Riku thrust his Keyblade into the pavement where he had stood before. Opening his mouth again, the Hollow stared at him and laughed.

"I can't believe I didn't realize it until now," the monster cackled. "That weapon you're carrying, that's no Zanpakuto - you're no Soul Reaper. And that means... you're _alive!_ "

Just as Riku had pulled his weapon free of the hole it had gouged out of the street, one of the Hollow's hands rapidly uncoiled, extending across the street and reaching him in the blink of an eye. Rather than sending him flying backward, however, it phased right through his body. Rukia's eyes widened as she watched what happened next - the silver-haired boy's body remained standing in the street for a moment before collapsing limply to the ground, his wing-shaped blade vanishing with a flash of blue-purple light as his soul was violently shoved out. Riku, now disembodied, flew backward with incredible force; he only came to a stop when the chain connecting him to his now-uninhabited body could no longer stretch any further, abruptly stopping him in midair. Not realizing what had happened right away, he held out his hand and attempted to re-summon his Keyblade, but found that nothing happened.

"What… what's going on?"

He glanced down, noticing the chain embedded in his chest for the first time; grasping it in one hand, he stared down its length until he spotted what it was connected to: himself, or at least that was what it looked like. There was an unconscious double of himself lying on the ground just twenty feet away from where he now stood. Before he could even attempt to figure out what had just happened, the Hollow began laughing maniacally and sprang down from his perch on the side of the building, raising both hands and repeatedly thrusting his claws toward the boy. He dodged one blow, then another, and another; they were coming faster and faster as the moments passed, shattering the pavement below him but narrowly missing every time as he dodged, jumped, and rolled out of their path just in the nick of time. That is, until he attempted to make another move and found that the chain had crossed over itself too many times, tangling together in a knot around him. The Hollow, the notorious "Jackknife" Mack who had haunted his childhood nightmares, raised both hands in front of his face and aimed them downward, twisting them into spring-like coils and preparing to launch them both directly at Riku's chest. The silver-haired boy gritted his teeth and spat out the first words that came to mind.

"D… damn you!"

As the Hollow's mouth opened wide and his laughter grew louder at the sight of Riku struggling, another voice quietly spoke up from behind.

"Carriage of thunder, bridge of a spinning wheel. With light, divide this into six!"

The Hollow glanced at Rukia, who was standing in a different stance than before and had one hand raised. His laughter stopped for just a moment, then roared out even louder than before.

"Eh? What was _that_ nonsense?", Mack spat between laughs. "Not really a good time for reciting poetry, don't ya think?"

Rukia did not react; she only narrowed her eyes and shifted her arm's position slightly, pointing at the Hollow with a single finger. A spark of bright yellowish-white light formed on her fingertip.

"Bakudo number sixty-one: Rikujokoro."

Before the Hollow knew what hit him, the light surrounding Rukia's finger flashed outward and solidified into six bars, which hovered around his midsection and then slammed inward one by one until he was completely surrounded. At first, Mack ignored the bars of light around his body and attempted to continue his attack on Riku; when he tried to rapidly uncoil his twisted arms and launch them spiraling downward, however, absolutely nothing happened. He tried to turn, tried to jump, tried to stick out his tongue… nothing. Rukia's spell had rendered him completely unable to move.

"Before you say anything," Rukia said, walking up to Riku and carefully untangling the chain that connected his soul to his body, "Your exact words _were_ 'as long as I'm still breathing.' And with no soul inside it… chances are that your body hasn't drawn breath in a while. We'd better fix that before it's too late."

As the Hollow struggled uselessly against the binding kido, Riku hurried over to his lifeless body lying on the ground, standing over it with a wide-eyed, confused look on his face. He'd never thought he'd see himself lying unconscious from overhead, just like all those stories of people "waking up" in the hospital and watching the doctors at work from somewhere around the ceiling long before they had actually awakened. Before he had a chance to think much more about it, he felt a swift blow to the back of his head, sending him tumbling forward toward… well, himself.

"C'mon, get back in there already!", Rukia snapped, shoving him toward his own unconscious body. "That kido's not going to hold forever!"

One last push and Riku experienced the very odd sensation of phasing through his own body, then awakening with his eyes (his actual, physical eyes this time, not his… spirit eyes, he supposed they could be called) suddenly shooting open as if startled awake from a bad dream. In an instant he was back on his feet, Keyblade flashing back into existence as he held one hand out to his side. The Hollow was still held in place, but he was now visibly struggling against the spell's hold; a second later, a crack began to form in one of the six rods of light, and the slight struggling movements grew stronger.

"Looks like you're having a hard time," Riku said, a purplish-blue glow beginning to form around his Keyblade as he spoke. "I guess it's a little unfair if I finish you off when you can't even move. This'll fix that."

In a flash, the glow around his weapon flared out to the oversized blade nearly twice its original length. The Hollow turned his head slightly just in time to see Riku take off running toward him, jumping at the last moment and delivering a single powerful slash that shattered the light prison… and split the Hollow in half diagonally across the chest, sending a splash of black blood flying.

"Gh… gaaaah!"

With a shuddering roar, "Jackknife" Mack's upper half tumbled forward and crashed face-first into the street. The lower half stumbled blindly about, what was left of the torso thrashing about wildly as if still trying to attack.

"Huh... looks like I overdid it a little."

For a moment both halves continued to move, and then the lower half fell over backward; a few seconds later, their twitching stopped and both pieces lay completely still. Riku lowered his weapon, the intense glow of dark energy that surrounded it fading and then vanishing altogether. He walked past the Hollow, heading over to the spot where Rukia was standing before turning to face his fallen opponent, expecting to see the street returning to its previous empty state as he dissolved away just as the other Hollows had.

Instead, what he saw was that the two halves had stretched out to meet in the middle, the severed edges connecting once again as the Hollow's clown-like face distorted into a grimace. The ragged edges had twisted and stretched into spirals of intestine-like material and then merged together, pulling the two halves back together and then melding back into the rest of the Hollow's skin as if they had never been there at all, not even leaving a scar behind in their wake.

"The mask is a Hollow's weak point," Rukia said. "Even if one can survive being cut in two... split the mask, and it's all over."

Riku nodded slightly, shifting his stance as he stared down the newly-whole "Jackknife" Mack. Kicking off the ground suddenly, Riku shot into the air high above even the tall, lanky Hollow's head. Mack raised both hands and prepared to clap them shut around the boy as he fell back toward him, but a burst of dark energy flared up all around him and provided a sudden boost of speed, launching him right past the Hollow's grasp. As the tiny black pupils in the center of the Hollow's eyes rattled around and widened at the sight of the silver-haired boy rapidly approaching, he thrust his Keyblade downward and said two final words.

"You're finished."

In an instant, Riku tore through the Hollow's masked head, splitting its skull completely in two before he dematerialized the weapon and cushioned his landing with one hand and one knee. For a few moments, the Hollow remained standing as if nothing had happened; then, suddenly a purple light began to radiate from the cut in the Hollow's mask. He let out a horrible roar of pain, and the light spread outward. Riku took a step back, eyes widening, while Rukia barely seemed to react at all. The purple light's range narrowed until it was only being projected down onto the street nearby, and with a deep rumbling a set of massive stone gates rose from the ground it shone upon. A dense fog seemed to roll in within seconds, billowing out from the gate as it began to creak open and shrouding the entire street.

"Whoa," Riku said, just above a whisper, as the light faded and the gates took on solid form; each one was adorned by an enormous bandaged skeleton, one arm crossed across its chest. "What _is_ this?"

"The gates of Hell," Rukia said, lowering her head the same way she had done after dispatching the first Hollow. She turned away as the gates gradually began to swing open further, only held back slightly by two black ropes crossed over each other.

Riku watched in stunned silence as an enormous arm, blue and covered in black tattoo-like markings, burst forth from the doorway. It held a knife the length of a small car, and this blade pierced through the defeated Hollow, lifting it up off of the ground. Each second seemed to take an eternity as the monstrous arm slowly pulled the Hollow backward, finally passing through the gate and vanishing from sight.

"When a Hollow is defeated, it's usually purified and sent on to the Soul Society," Rukia explained as she began to walk away. "But those Hollows who were unspeakably evil even _before_ death…"

"They go to Hell," Riku finished for her, still staring ahead at the bizarre scene playing out in the middle of the moonlit street. The gate was closed now; right before Riku's eyes, the stones it was constructed from eroded away and the skeletons decorating its doors crumbled to dust and blew away on the wind. "I didn't even think there _was_ a Hell…"

Rukia laughed slightly.

"Oh, I've heard that one before," she said. "But don't worry, only the worst of the worst are ever sentenced to Hell. Serial killers, rapists, war criminals… I'm sure nobody you know will pass through those gates."

Riku turned and began to walk after her. For the first time in over a year, he found that he couldn't push the memories of Xehanort - or Ansem, or whatever he wanted to call himself - out of his mind. Part of him hated to even imagine it, but some other part of him couldn't help but picture the orange-eyed "Seeker of Darkness" impaled on that knife in the Hollow's place. Despite her well-intentioned reassurances, the little Soul Reaper really had no idea what degree of evil his life had already brushed up against.

"Nah," he said, overtaking her pace and turning to head down a different street. "I'm pretty sure you're wrong about that last part."


	7. School Days

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 7  
**

 _~ School Days ~_

Riku's next day at school began just like every other day, with the exception of the fact that he had spent part of the previous night locked in battle against the Hollow that, in life, had been "Jackknife" Mack, the most notorious criminal to stalk the islands in recent history. The events of last night were no longer on his mind for now, though - he had slept better that night than any other night he could remember for a long time, and knowing that his mother's murderer was now, finally, gone forever probably had a lot to do with that.

He met up with Sora and Kairi after breakfast and all three walked to school together as they usually did. The events of the previous night - meeting the mysterious Soul Reaper known as Rukia, defeating the Hollow, seeing his twisted soul damned to Hell right before his eyes - had slipped so far to the back of his mind that he didn't even think to mention them during the walk over. As the three reached their high school, they stopped just outside the building as other students flooded in around them. Sora and Riku had both been held back a year due to being absent during previous adventures, so Riku (who, being a year older, was once a year ahead of the other two) was now in the same year as Kairi and Sora lagged behind the two of them. After saying their goodbyes, Riku and Kairi headed off down one hallway while Sora turned around a corner and went in another direction.

Riku and Kairi made it to their classroom just in time to avoid the late bell, settling into their usual seats. But, as they soon noticed, something was up - there was a lot more murmuring among the other students than usual, with a lot of pointing in the direction of a certain student that neither Riku or Kairi immediately recognized, at least not from the back of her head. She was wearing their school's uniform, so it seemed clear that she was indeed someone who was supposed to be there, but as far as anyone could remember she had never been present in class before today. The chatter grew quieter (but didn't completely die down, of course) as their teacher entered the room, standing by the chalkboard and turning to face the class.

"As some of you may have already noticed," she said, giving a quick glance to the source of some of the louder whispers, "We have a new student in our class today. She's an exchange student from…"

The teacher squinted at the notes on the paperwork in front of her, a bit confused; she had never heard of the school listed as her previous location, and no address or other identifying information was listed alongside it. After a couple moments of awkward silence, she gave up on figuring that out and went on ahead - the transfer papers had already been approved by the school's higher-ups, after all. Her job was to teach the students, not make sure they were there legally.

"An exchange student from Shin'ou Academy," she continued, turning toward the small black-haired girl who nobody in the class recognized. "Now, could you please come to the blackboard and introduce yourself to the class?"

The black-haired girl stood up and walked forward, turning around as she reached the front of the class and bowing slightly. Riku's eyes widened; he hadn't recognized her before, when he'd only seen the back of her head, but now that he had gotten a better look it was obvious to him who the "new student" really was. As she turned to write her name on the board, Riku turned toward Kairi.

"She's no ordinary exchange student," he whispered.

"Hmm… I guess not," Kairi whispered back a bit more quietly, giving the blackboard an odd look. "She's writing her first name in katakana… you don't see that too often. Oh, look, now she's drawing some little bunny thing next to it!"

Riku sighed slightly.

"No, not _that_ … I saw her last night," he explained. "When I was out tracking down Hollows. She's-"

"Riku Hashimoto," the teacher said, interrupting him. "Do you have something to share with the class?"

He turned back toward the front of the class and shook his head. As the disguised Soul Reaper walked back to her seat, she shot Riku a quick glance - the kind that said "if you go telling everybody I'll stab you" without any need for words. Hurriedly taking out his notes from the previous class, he focused his eyes on the pages and kept his head down for the remainder of the class.

* * *

The rest of the day was surprisingly normal - though a bit nerve-wracking for Riku. He had several classes with Rukia, it turned out, and spent much of the day keeping an eye out for any sign of suspicious behavior from her. She was, after all, not even a living human - she had told him herself that she was probably ten times his age and had come from someplace called "Soul Society," which he hadn't asked for any more information about at the time but could only assume was a part of the afterlife that was more pleasant than Hell. What would be the point of someone like her attending an ordinary high school? If her mission was to eliminate Hollows and send their souls on to whichever part of the afterlife was appropriate, it seemed like her time would be better spent patrolling the area for signs of their presence. She had seemed friendly enough (after their initial clash, anyway) the night before, but he couldn't help but suspect something fishy was going on.

If something fishy _was_ going on, however, there was no sign of it at any point during their day at school. Rukia mostly kept to herself, occasionally making small talk with some of the other students who approached her first. She sat by herself at lunch, so Riku sat at just the right angle to keep watch on her without looking suspicious himself. Sora and Kairi were a bit confused at their friend's insistence on sitting in a completely different spot than usual, but shrugged and went along with it - a change of scenery (even if it was just school cafeteria scenery) every now and then was a good thing, after all.

On the way home from school, the three took a slightly different route than usual, passing by a run-down abandoned house in a part of town they had only visited during their nightly Hollow-hunting trips. Usually, an old house wouldn't even catch their attention, but _this_ time the house was plastered with tall posters advertising that one of the various ghost-hunting TV shows was going to be stopping by that very night in an attempt to find evidence of the spirits rumored to be haunting the place.

"Ghost hunters, huh?", Riku said, glancing up at the poster.

"I wonder if the noise from all the Hollows lately is what's brought them here," Kairi said, a worried look beginning to show on her face. "Maybe we should keep an eye on this place, just in case..."

Sora looked at the house, then at Riku.

"So... who's on Hollow-busting duty tonight, anyway?", he asked. "I've got a little bit of homework to work on, but..."

"Research paper," Riku said, sighing slightly. "It's due tomorrow and I've only got the first paragraph written. Looks like this one's up to you two."

They continued on, finally reaching the street where Riku's house was located and returning to their usual route. It was at this point that Riku remembered that he still hadn't told the others about where he'd seen Rukia before and what was so unusual about her. He was just about to begin explaining when Kairi turned and waved at someone on the other side of the street - and, just his luck, it was the very same person he was about to bring up.

"Hello! You're Rukia, right?", she said, catching the dark-haired girl's attention. She had been staring down at the screen of a cellphone as she walked and hurriedly flipped it shut the moment she realized that other people were around. "I didn't know you lived out this way."

"Well... I don't, really," she said, tucking the phone away. "It's just such a nice day out that I decided I'd go for a bit of a walk before I headed home. How about you?"

Kairi nodded slightly.

"Yeah, we took the long way today," she said. "Riku's house isn't far from here, so the three of us were just about to split up and head home. Where _do_ you live, anyway? I haven't heard of anyone taking in any exchange students recently."

Rukia flinched slightly; Riku caught on to the nervous movement, but it seemed Sora and Kairi were oblivious. After a brief pause, she finally replied.

"Well... I just got here last night," she began, "And I didn't really have anywhere to stay yet, but it turned out the mayor had a couple of spare bedrooms, so..."

"Wow, really?", Kairi said. "So we're pretty much neighbors now, then - I've been living at the mayor's place ever since I was five years old!"

She paused for a moment, an odd thought coming to mind.

"It's kind of funny though," she said, "I wonder how we didn't end up bumping into each other before school..."

Rukia laughed nervously.

"Well, I _did_ sleep in a little today... trouble sleeping last night," she answered almost immediately. The reality of the situation, of course, was that she had crept in through an unlocked window the night before and was now sleeping in the closet of the spare room that seemed to get the least traffic from the house's other residents. "If you walked all the way to school, you were probably gone before I even got out of bed."

Riku briefly wondered how the little Soul Reaper got to school - if she took the bus or if she had her own car, or maybe a bicycle. Somehow having a car seemed unlikely, partly because he would've thought Kairi would notice a new car mysteriously present in the mayor's driveway and partly because he seriously doubted that they'd have cars in the afterlife. A car wouldn't have a soul, after all… unless there was some world populated by living cars out there that he hadn't stumbled across yet, anyway.

"Hey, did you know they're having some ghost-hunter show come to this abandoned house around here tonight?", Sora suddenly butted in. "Me and Kairi are going, how about you?"

Rukia laughed and shrugged.

"I doubt there's _really_ any ghosts in that house," she said. "But I'm not too busy tonight, so maybe I'll see you two there."

Of course, she was in fact planning to be there, but in Soul Reaper form - leaving the false body she was using to disguise herself as an ordinary human behind and scouting out the place to make sure no Hollows interrupt the ghost-hunting show. She hadn't been able to detect their presence in the area, but there was still a lingering suspicion that _something_ was off about that house.

With waves and smiles, Sora and Kairi kept walking in one direction while Rukia went in the other. Riku glanced at her as she passed, but she barely even seemed to acknowledge his presence, just walking on ahead. Once the other two were outside of hearing range, she turned and spoke.

"That weapon you used last night," she said, just loud enough for Riku to hear without being overheard by anyone further off. "Where I come from there's only one weapon with an eye embedded in the handle like that… they're known as 'Bakkoto.' They're highly illegal, though… and very rare, almost unheard of. I've only ever seen pictures in the archives."

Riku turned slightly and gave her a confused look. He had no idea what she was talking about.

"Tell me. Your weapon isn't a Bakkoto… is it?"

"I have no idea what a 'Bakkoto' is," Riku said, shaking his head. "But the weapon I used last night is called _Way to the Dawn_ … it's my Keyblade."

Rukia's eyes widened. The reports she had been given said that the only three known Keybearers on this world had died in an explosion caused by a powerful Hollow; it didn't seem like there was any possibility that there were more of them around. According to Soul Society's most recent information, there were probably no more than ten Keybearers remaining in all of the many worlds scattered throughout the Realm of Light. At least four on a single world - no, four in a single _city!_ \- surely meant that there were many more than that elsewhere. The scattered details she knew about the Keyblade War that raged across the realm a thousand years ago came to mind one after another. She never thought she would actually meet a Keybearer face to face, much less fight alongside one against the mutual enemy they now shared in the Hollows - or go to school with one, for that matter. The image of them in her mind was more militaristic, a reclusive order of armored warriors obsessively guarding the secrets of the weapons that their ancestors had passed down; she hadn't expected a Keybearer to be someone she could just pass on the street one day and never know any better if she hadn't seen him in action before.

As Rukia just stood and stared, unable to form any words, Riku picked up his pace in order to catch up with his two friends. He turned back at Rukia for just a moment as he went, waving goodbye to her before breaking into a full run.

"A Keyblade," she mumbled to herself, unable to do much else but blink and stare. When Sora and Kairi looked back to see if Riku was still following them, she quickly spun around and hurried off in the opposite direction.

"Ooh, you hung back to talk to the new girl, huh?", Sora asked, turning around and walking backwards as his silver-haired friend caught up to him. "Lemme guess… you _like_ her, don't you?"

Riku nearly choked on his own spit. Regaining his composure a little, he grabbed Sora by the shoulders and shook him a bit.

"Are you nuts!? It wasn't like that, I just…"

"Don't be silly, Sora," Kairi said, separating the two boys. "They only just met _today_ , after all."

Riku nodded; technically it had been last night, but that was close enough. Kairi put her hand to her chin for a moment, gazing upward, then looked back to Riku and smiled.

"But you know, you two _would_ be cute together," she said. Riku quickly jerked his head toward Kairi and grimaced. She just giggled in response. "I mean… think about it, she's so little, you could probably carry her around on your back or something!"

Riku sighed.

"Not you too, Kairi…"

Before anything more could be said, Sora's attempts at walking backward once again fell flat on their face - or rather, Sora fell flat on his back as the heel of one of his oversized shoes bumped awkwardly against a section of raised sidewalk. Kairi and Riku each grabbed one of his arms and helped him up, and then the three of them resumed their walk down the sidewalk as though nothing had happened.

"Well," Riku said, glancing across the street a few minutes later, "Here's my stop. You two keep on the lookout for anything weird going on tonight, and let me know how things go."

Sora nodded and grinned in response, and then all three waved goodbye to each other as Riku crossed the street and headed inside for a long night of research-paper writing.


	8. Like Father, Like Son?

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 8  
**

 _~ Like Father, Like Son? ~_

That night, Sora and Kairi went to the abandoned house where they had spotted the ghost-hunting show's posters earlier - and it wasn't quite so abandoned this time around. A crowd had gathered outside, watching a set of monitors that had been set up in the ghost-hunters' van (the side door had been slid open so everyone could see) and connected to the cameras placed at various points inside the house. So far, all of them just showed empty rooms and hallways, all in various shades of night-vision green; occasionally one of the ghost-hunters would stumble into view carrying a flashlight and wave it around a bit, but it seemed like nothing out of the ordinary was going on.

Until, that is, a pained howl echoed through the air all around them. Sora nearly jumped out of his shoes at the sound, but the crowd around the two of them didn't react at all.

"What the heck was _that!?_ "

"It sounded like it was coming from inside the house," Kairi said. She glanced at the monitors, but saw nothing. "It didn't sound like the Hollows we've seen so far, but…"

One of the monitors switched to a different camera, and immediately the source of the sound became obvious. A middle-aged man was standing in front of an ornate fireplace in one of the house's larger rooms, with chains wrapping around him and connecting to the wall of the building. He shuffled about a bit, rattling the chains, and let out another howl… but again, it seemed that nobody but Sora and Kairi could actually hear.

"That guy… he must be…"

"A Hollow?", Kairi asked, shaking her head. "No, I don't think so. Something definitely seems wrong here, but… he's not attacking anybody or anything, just making a lot of noise."

Sora crossed his arms and stared at the screen where the chained man was visible.

"Let's hope it stays that way," he said. "With this place as crowded as it is, it's gonna be hard for us to…"

Before he could finish his sentence, the crowd suddenly started murmuring about something, jostling around more than usual and bumping into each other. A couple yards away from them, someone was walking straight through the crowd, with occasional calls of "pardon me" or "make way, please." Sora and Kairi attempted to get a look at whoever it was who was pushing their way toward the house, but without much luck. Before long, though, the source of the disturbance made himself obvious. A man wearing long white robes and an elaborately decorated priest's hat emerged from the front of the crowd and turned to face them, raising a staff tipped with a sun-like emblem high above his head. Sora and Kairi's jaws dropped.

"No way," Kairi said, thinking she recognized the priest from somewhere but having difficulty believing what she saw. "Sora, is that…?"

"Yeah!", Sora said, grinning from ear to ear. "That guy up there, with those awesome robes and that staff, he's…"

At that moment, the white-robed man caught sight of the two in the crowd and smiled, pointing his staff right at them and waving with his free hand. Sora waved right back even more enthusiastically.

"...my dad!"

A security guard approached the front of the house where Sora's father now stood, but before he could get within arm's reach of him, the priest's staff moved in between them to block the way.

"Stand aside," he said, waving one finger at him. "This is no place for those whose eyes have not seen the light. Can none of you hear that an evil spirit haunts this place?"

The guard gave him an odd look, then stepped back, figuring that the priest must have been hired by the ghost-hunting team as part of their show. He nodded and lowered his staff, then walked right up to the front doors of the house and swung them wide open. Sora and Kairi pushed closer to the front of the crowd, each of them wanting a better look at what was going on. Almost instantly, the howling from inside the house intensified - and, as Sora and Kairi both noticed, Sora's dad seemed to actually hear it, as he took a step back and braced himself with his staff held out in front of him.

" _Your dad_ can see ghosts?"

"Yeah, I guess so," Sora said, nodding slightly. He briefly wondered why he had taken such a long time to develop that ability even when he was out fighting Hollows every other night; he figured it must not be the sort of thing you can just inherit from your parents.

When the howling quieted down for a moment, the white-robed priest walked through the doors, forcing Sora and Kairi to watch him on the ghost-hunting team's monitors instead of being able to see him in person. He walked throughout the house, shouting out things like "show yourself, foul demon!" until finally he had reached the room with the fireplace, where the ghost was still chained-up and howling at every sound of movement around him.

It was at this point that Sora and Kairi became aware of a small, black-robed figure sitting on the edge of the ghost-hunters' van, staring intently at the door that Sora's father had entered. For a moment, she was still; then, she scrambled to the other side of the van and dropped down, staring directly at the monitor that showed the fireplace and the spirit chained to the wall in front of it. Sora and Kairi adjusted their positions so that they could still see the screen, but oddly enough nobody else seemed to have any difficulty seeing - there were no complaints from the crowd at large, not even those shorter members of the crowd who were having a hard enough time seeing as it was. At this point, Sora's dad had approached the spirit, pointing his staff at him in order to keep some distance between them.

"Ah, there you are," he said, staring down the ghost with a far more serious look on his face than before. "Chained to the walls, howling at all that approaches... some dark force has bound you here, preventing you from going onward into the light."

"Huh," the black-robed figure said, "So that guy really _can_ see them..."

"Yeah," Sora said, tapping her on the shoulder, "We can't see _through_ you, though. Could you at least scoot back a little?"

She flinched and jerked her head around suddenly. Sora and Kairi immediately recognized her as none other than Rukia Kuchiki, the exchange student who had suddenly shown up at their school earlier that same day - though now she was wearing some sort of black robes rather than her school uniform.

"You two can see me, too!?"

Kairi blinked.

"Umm... why _wouldn't_ we be able to see you?"

"Yeah," Sora said, scratching his head. "Didn't we just see you earlier today?"

Rukia laughed nervously, then scooted out of the way of the monitor, relocating herself alongside Sora and Kairi rather than blocking their view.

"It was a joke," she said, forcing a smile. "You know… since we're at a haunted house and all. I'm not _really_ a ghost or anything!"

Sora laughed a little, while Kairi didn't look entirely convinced but eventually nodded and focused her attention back on the monitor. Sora's father had drawn closer to the spirit chained to the wall, who would occasional lurch forward and shout at him, rattling the chains in the process - the phrase "get out!" was a common theme, along with a variety of threats which, so far, seemed to be empty ones.

"I can feel your pain, lost soul. You've been here far too long," the priest said, waving his staff at the spirit and causing him to back away a bit as it swung so close as to almost strike him. "Held down by that Chain of Nightmares, bound to this dark and impure world, unable to pass on to the true Realm of Light which lies beyond the reach of the living…"

Rukia blinked a few times, then mumbled to herself, briefly forgetting that Sora and Kairi might be able to hear her.

"He's using some weird names for things, but… he's actually not too far off…"

Kairi glanced at her, not sure if she had heard her say something or not, but when Rukia didn't react she figured she must have just been hearing someone else in the crowd talking to themselves or to others around them.

"The time has come for you to leave this place," the priest continued, raising his staff and pointing the golden sun-like tip toward the spirit's chest. For the first time, Sora and Kairi noticed a crescent-shaped hole there, located exactly where the upper-left corner of a Hollow's hole would normally be. A moment later Rukia saw it too, and her eyes widened.

"When you go into the light… tell those you meet on the other side that your path was opened by the high priest Kazuki Kaneshiro!"

With that, he thrust his staff into the crescent-shaped opening, causing the spirit to roar in pain. Unlike the previous howls which went unnoticed by those unable to sense spirits, this sound shook the building itself, shattering windows and causing several of the ghost hunters (in another room halfway across the house at the time) to yelp in fear and nearly wet themselves. Rukia gasped.

"No," she said, staring at the screen in front of her with eyes wide, "No… this is all wrong. He's not helping that spirit pass on at all… he's…"

Jerking his staff to the other side of the spirit's chest, Kazuki widened the gap, causing another terrible roar of pain to echo throughout the house (and one of the ghost-hunters to faint from fear, collapsing onto an old rat-eaten bed that fortunately happened to be just close enough by to prevent him from ending up with a nasty bump on the head.)

"Let the light into your heart, lost soul!", the priest shouted, waving the staff back and forth furiously and widening the hole in the spirit's chest further and further. "It hurts, I know... but this pain you feel is merely the forces of darkness trying their hardest to tighten their grip as you slip from their grasp forever! Do not resist - let go, and be freed!"

Rukia reached down to her left side, grasping the hilt of a sword which Sora and Kairi only just now noticed was sheathed there. She took a step forward, then leaped up onto the roof of the van, causing it to shake slightly and making a large portion of the crowd jump back a bit, fearing that some spirit from the house had burst forth to attack them. She turned for a moment and glanced back down at Sora and Kairi, then drew her weapon, finally abandoning all hope of keeping them convinced that she was only an ordinary high school student.

"That soul is about to transform into a Hollow," she said, turning back toward the house. "It's almost too late to do anything… I can't just sit back and watch this any longer. You two stay here - things might get dangerous."

"I'm going in too," Sora said, running past the van and approaching the doorway. "That's my dad in there - I can't let him get hurt if something bad happens."

Rukia glared at him.

"There's nothing you can do now," she said. "Normal humans like you would be completely helpless against even a weak Hollow, whether you can see them or not. Let me handle this."

Before Sora could say anything in response, the Soul Reaper made a flying leap over his head and landed in front of the door. Just as the security guard rushed over to block Sora's passage, the doors swung open (and, to the guard and the crowds gathered outside who couldn't see Rukia at all, they seemed to swing open on their own.) He lunged for Sora, attempting to pin him to the ground, but the spiky-haired boy ducked out of the way and charged onward through the doors before the guard's arms even came close to him.

By the time Rukia reached the room where Kazuki had confronted the earthbound spirit, it was nearly too late - the soul's chest now displayed an almost complete Hollow hole, with only a small fragment at the bottom remaining intact. The spirit lashed out at Kazuki, rattling his chains furiously and attempting to pull free of his imprisonment, but to no avail; the priest simply stepped back and raised his staff again, chanting something under his breath which caused a faint glow of light to emanate from the sun-like design at its tip.

"Stop, you fool!", Rukia shouted, barging into the room with her sword drawn. He did, indeed, stop… at least for the moment, as he glanced over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow to see who had interrupted him.

"Eh? And who are you, little girl?"

Rukia glared at him.

"My name is Rukia Kuchiki," she said, "And I am no mere 'little girl'… I am a Soul Reaper, sworn to protect the souls of the living and the dead. You've done enough - _more_ than enough, I should say. Let me take over from here."

Kazuki smiled.

"So you're the Reaper, eh? Just about thin enough, but I was expecting someone taller," he said, laughing dismissively. "And that costume, prop sword and all… pretty impressive design work, but aren't you a bit early? Halloween isn't for almost two months, after all!"

Rukia shifted into a battle stance, but Kazuki didn't flinch.

"I would suggest you stay back and do not interrupt me further," he said, "Lest you bring shame upon your family."

For one brief moment, her older brother's stern gaze flashed through her mind; this gave Rukia pause just long enough for the priest to finish what he had started. He turned away from her and thrust his staff forward, fully opening the hole in the spirit's chest and causing a flash of light to illuminate the entire room for just a moment. The soul's eyes began to glow white as he let out a roar even louder than those that preceded it. The chains that tied the spirit to the house rapidly dissolved away; Rukia shuddered at the sight, as she could see even from where she was standing that they were not so much dissolving as _eating themselves,_ with tiny mouths forming on each link as it devoured the next along with itself. A wave of spiritual pressure erupted from the place where the spirit was standing, nearly knocking Kazuki off his feet just as Sora entered the room. His hat slipped from his head and tumbled downward, and when he fumbled after it he ended up falling over the rest of the way, ending up in an embarrassing heap on the floor.

"Dad! Get outta here, things are about to get really dangerous!"

Kazuki jumped to his feet and turned toward the sound of his son's voice, eyes widening at the sight of Sora rushing into the room and summoning a Keyblade in a flash of golden-yellow light.

"Sora, get him to safety," Rukia said, placing herself in front of where the priest was standing. She was keeping her eyes focused on the spirit, watching for any signs of the Hollow transformation's development. "I can handle things here myself."

Sora nodded. Dismissing his Keyblade for now, he ran over to his father and helped him up with one hand, then dragged him out of the house (with the sounds of his objections following all the way.) Once they had safely breached the doorway once again, Sora hurriedly apologized as the security guard finally got his hands on his dad, then rushed back inside the house before the guard could think of reaching for him too. The entire building now seemed to be shaking; the roars of the transforming spirit had shattered nearly all of the brittle old windows at this point, and even the clueless crowd outside was beginning to worry that something more than just your average reality TV show episode was going on inside. The ghost hunters who remained conscious were now hiding in closets or behind any large piece of furniture they could find. And, just as the spiky-haired boy managed to make his way back to the room where the spirit had been bound, the form of the lost soul disintegrated before his very eyes.

"Wha… what happened?"

Rukia didn't even turn toward him when she replied, keeping her eyes focused on the last place the spirit had been.

"That soul… that earthbound spirit, tied by the Chain of Fate to this house and unable to move beyond its walls," she began. Slowly, black and white particles began to float throughout the air in the room, swirling around like a miniature tornado and beginning to condense into a space right in front of the fireplace. "Over years of despair, he had begun to lose the battle against the forces eating away at his heart… beginning the transformation into a Hollow. And now, thanks to that priest's blundering…"

A roar shook the house, followed by a wave of spiritual pressure that ruffled Rukia's clothing but otherwise brought about no reaction from the little Soul Reaper. The particles in the air were now taking form again, but this time not that of anything remotely human - the Hollow looked more like a nine-foot-tall hunchbacked frog, with a white skeletal mask covering its wide face.

"Now… he is no longer merely a 'demi-Hollow.' The transformation is complete."


	9. Tearing Down the Walls

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 9  
**

 _~ Tearing Down the Walls ~  
_

On the outside of the abandoned house, things seemed surprisingly calm considering that most of the house's windows had shattered and the ghost hunters (aside from one passed-out one lying on a bed on the second floor) were nowhere to be seen. Kazuki had now joined the crowd after being dragged away from the house, and although the security guard kept a close eye on him, so far he had not been removed from the premises. Among the gathered masses, only he and Kairi could see what was going on - the bound spirit had now fully transformed into a Hollow, and Rukia and Sora were the only ones standing in its path.

"Why did you come back?", Rukia asked, hearing the sounds of Sora's footsteps behind her. "You know it's not safe in here - you saw what happened. Leave this to me."

Sora smirked, summoning his Keyblade in a flash. Rukia's eyes widened slightly as she noticed the light illuminating the room around her.

"Take a look," he said, brandishing the weapon. "You're not the only one around here with a secret weapon you don't tell everybody about, y'know."

Rukia turned her head and almost gasped at the sight of it. While she hadn't been sure about Riku's wing-shaped weapon when she had first gotten a glimpse of it, the object in Sora's hand was obviously a Keyblade - a gigantic silvery key with a sword's handle couldn't be anything else. And this meant that there wasn't only _one_ Keybearer on this island that Soul Society wasn't aware of; there were at least two. How many more were still in hiding? Just how out-of-date _was_ their information, anyway? Before she could think about it any further, she noticed the Hollow rearing back out of the corner of her eye and spun around just in time to swing her blade, intercepting a blob of green goop moments before it would have hit her square in the face. Unfortunately, rather than destroying the slime this simply split it into two smaller globs, which struck her shoulders and pushed her into the wall. When she tried to pull away from the wall to mount a charge against the Hollow, she found that she was stuck tight; even pushing with all her strength didn't budge the goo.

The Hollow let out a roar and charged forward, opening its mouth wide as it approached Rukia. She attempted to twist her arm into a position where the charging Hollow might impale itself on her Zanpakuto, then closed her eyes and just waited.

Rather than feeling the weight of the Hollow bearing down on her sword - or worse, its jaws clamping down around her - she only heard a sound of clashing metal. Reopening her eyes, she saw Sora standing in front of her, bracing against the Hollow, with his Keyblade wedged into its mouth in a way that prevented it from biting down. When it raised one of its clawed arms to swipe at him instead, he pulled his weapon free and delivered a series of quick blows to the creature's midsection, sending it stumbling backward further and further across the room with each hit. Finally, he lunged forward and let out a battle cry as he thrust his Keyblade forward, sending the Hollow crashing into the fireplace and causing the entire wall behind it to creak. Loose bricks scattered, old photographs on the mantelpiece fell off and their frames smashed to bits, and for the moment at least the skull-masked monster was motionless, buried under a pile of rubble.

Sora turned and walked back over to Rukia, aiming his Keyblade toward one of her shoulders. A narrow beam of light shone from its tip, and almost instantly the goop slipped off of its prisoner and fell harmlessly to the ground before evaporating into thin air.

"How did you…?"

"A Keyblade can unlock anything," Sora said, doing the same to the glob of slime constricting Rukia's other arm. He scratched his head for a moment and grinned. "I really wasn't sure if it'd work, since, uh… Hollow snot, or whatever that was… isn't really _locked_ , but-"

"Look out!"

The Hollow broke out from the wreckage of the fireplace, lunging across the room. Rukia and Sora both hopped out of the way just in time to avoid it, but the Hollow wasn't able to stop on such short notice and ended up smashing through the wall, splitting a decaying couch in the next room in half as it stumbled to a stop. On the outside, the camera feed of the room where the Hollow had first appeared suddenly cut off, filling the monitor that it was linked to with a chaotic jumble of gray-and-white fuzz. Kairi gasped.

"It must've broken the camera," she said, staring at the blank screen. Kazuki glanced at the redhead for a moment, then pulled her into a one-armed hug.

"Don't you worry," he said, "My boy Sora's in there… things are going to work out just fine."

Kairi frowned, then squirmed out of his grip and took off running for the door. She couldn't just sit back and watch anymore. Sora might be more experienced, but she was catching up to him now that she'd had her own Keyblade for more than a year - especially now that, with the appearance of so many Hollows, she had actually managed to use it in battle against something more powerful than just ordinary Shadow Heartless. The security guard caught sight of her approaching the house, but she was already through the door before he had gotten anywhere near her.

Kairi ran through the house, summoning her Keyblade as she caught sight of the Hollow up ahead. The monster turned and noticed her approaching, then swatted at one piece of the destroyed couch, sending it hurtling through the air in her direction. She dove to the ground, sliding across an old rug just as the hunk of couch flew over her head and smashed through the wall behind her, pulverizing the small camera that had been attached to it. On the outside, yet another monitor went blank. Springing back up, she jumped over the other half of the couch as the Hollow shoved it toward her, then landed just in time to lunge forward and deliver an upward swing of her Keyblade directly into the Hollow's jaw, sending it staggering back for a few moments before crashing to the floor. Just as the Hollow began to stand, Sora came charging in from behind it, slamming it back into the floor with an overhead smash from his own Keyblade. Finally, Rukia suddenly appeared in the room with a burst of speed, slicing clean through the Hollow's mask before it had a chance to stand up again.

"There," she said, sheathing her sword and lowering her head for a moment as the Hollow's form disintegrated into the dusty air around them. "It's done. He'll finally be able to leave this world."

Sora scratched his head.

"So, uh… where exactly do they go?", he asked. "Is it like my dad said, or…"

Rukia sighed.

"Your father's ideas were… close in a way, I suppose, but not quite right," she said, turning to face the two Keybearers. She tapped one hand on the hilt of her sword. "When Hollows are defeated by splitting their mask using a Zanpakuto like mine, their souls are purified and sent to Soul Society."

The spiky-haired boy was immediately reminded of the Heartless, and how destroying them with his Keyblade purified their hearts so that they could drift off to become one in Kingdom Hearts, never to return to Heartless form again. Well, unless someone blew a chunk out of it and sent stray hearts scattering across the Realm of Darkness, anyway… but that wasn't something that happened often, to say the least.

"Soul Society?", Sora asked. "Uh… is that what you call the afterlife?"

Rukia nodded.

"All souls pass on to Soul Society once they leave the living realm," she continued. "Well… all but a few. Those who have committed unforgivable sins during their lives are sent to be punished in Hell instead."

She paused, glancing at Kairi's Keyblade - that made _three_ previously unknown Keybearers now. For a moment, she wondered who might suddenly show up wielding a Keyblade next. Sora's father, the bumbling high priest who had gotten them into this mess, didn't seem to be a likely candidate… but it was hard to count out anyone at this point.

"But anyway… the important part is, the soul of the man who was bound to this house is in a better place now," she said, smiling slightly. "The pain he was in before he transformed into a Hollow, that will all be washed away now. He'll be able to see his family again, old friends who passed away before him… going by the shape this house was in, there's a chance that everyone he ever knew in life is already on the other side."

Kairi glanced at Sora for a moment, then back to Rukia. She smiled; it was a nice thought, being able to reunite with loved ones after death. She had always hoped that whatever waited for her after death would be like that - she'd never really known her family, having been sent away from her original home at such a young age, but she had always wanted to see them again someday. Her only memories of her parents were vague, fuzzy images - a man with slightly shaggy black hair and a woman with a long mane of curls which were a vibrant red much like her own hair. Kairi's grandmother stood out more clearly, if only because of all the stories she would always tell her before bed.

"We should leave this place," Rukia said, interrupting Kairi's train of thought right away. "Most of the crowd won't be able to see me, but the two of you…"

Sora blinked, then hurriedly unsummoned his Keyblade in a flash of light, not wanting to have to worry about the questions people might ask him if they saw him wielding such a weapon. Kairi followed moments afterward, and then Sora turned and headed off back toward the front door.

"Well... see you in school tomorrow, I guess," Sora said, turning back for a moment and waving to Rukia as he went. The little Soul Reaper nodded in response, then turned to Kairi, who was still standing right where she had been before.

"Typical Sora," the redhead said, sighing slightly and crossing her arms. "Never stops to ask questions. I've got a few of my own, though. Like… who _are_ you, anyway?"

She took a few steps closer to Rukia, getting a closer look at her unusual clothing and the sheathed katana - a Zanpakuto, she had called it - that hung from her belt at her left side.

"How come everyone could see you just fine at school, but then you show up in those black clothes and it's like you're invisible to everyone but us?"

Rukia blinked rapidly. With how much time those two seemed to spend with Riku, it was a bit of a shock to learn that he hadn't already told them about her. She was about to explain it all to Kairi, but then another thought came to mind - Kairi wasn't the only one who had questions. Not even close.

"How about this," Rukia said. "All four of us - you, Sora, Riku, and I - we'll all walk to school together tomorrow. I'll explain everything then... and I'd appreciate if you could tell me more about yourselves, too. I'd especially like to know more about how you ended up with those… Keyblades."

Kairi nodded.

"Sure," she said, smiling slightly. "We've fought a Hollow together now, after all. There's no reason to hide anything from each other. I'm sure Sora and Riku feel the same way."

Rukia flinched slightly; somehow, she wasn't so sure about that. But she pushed that thought to the back of her mind, forced a smile of her own, and nodded back. Then, with a burst of speed that made her movement all but invisible to Kairi's eyes, she sped off to another room of the house and slipped out through an open window, disappearing into the night.

Kairi just stood and stared for a moment, mouth gaping open slightly. Then, shaking her head and shrugging, she turned and walked off, picking up her pace a bit when she noticed that Sora had already left the abandoned house without her.


	10. Calm Before the Storm

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 10  
**

 _~ Calm Before the Storm ~  
_

Kisuke Urahara just sat back behind the counter and watched as Rukia, now back in her school uniform (and the false body that went with it), browsed around from one aisle of his shop to the next. Previous Soul Reapers assigned to this world rarely stayed in the shop for long, grabbing one or two things and then quickly rushing off after scrounging up just barely enough money to afford them; this one, on the other hand, was filling up an entire bag with various items. A few more things and it would be close to overflowing.

"Must've picked up a pretty hefty bounty lately, huh?", Urahara asked. "Any Hollow I might've heard of?"

The little Soul Reaper turned toward the shopkeeper and nodded.

"'Jackknife' Mack," she answered. "Though... I wasn't really the one who finished him off. It turns out that a Keyblade can banish evil souls to Hell just was well as a Zanpakuto can."

Urahara looked up slightly.

"A Keyblade, you say? Hmm…"

Rukia nodded.

"Yeah. I've never seen a Keybearer in action before I came here, but... it seems that there's a few still around after all."

"It makes sense if you think about it, though," Urahara said, nodding slightly and lowering his head so that the shadow of his hat covered his face once again. Rukia hadn't even noticed the way he had changed the subject away from the number of surviving Keybearers, focusing in on the Keyblade's abilities instead. "The key that can open any door... opening the gates of Hell."

She briefly wondered what other doors a Keyblade could open - if they could bring forth the gates of Hell, could they also create a Senkaimon and travel to Soul Society? Or could they reach even further beyond, to the realm of Holows, or to unknown places that even Soul Reapers were forbidden from setting foot within? She wasn't sure what had brought forth such a thought, but even imagining the possibilities unnerved her. Picking up her pace a bit, she plucked a candy dispenser - rabbit-themed, of course - from one of the dusty back shelves most of the shop's customers avoided and then headed to the counter to pay.

"You're in a hurry all of a sudden," Urahara said, watching as she dumped a small heap of circular, hole-punched coins onto the counter. One eye slipped out from under the shadow of his hat and glanced at her knowingly. "Something on your mind?"

She paused for a moment, briefly going over everything that _was_ on her mind - the nature of the Keyblades and their wielders, how three seemingly ordinary kids managed to come upon weapons notorious for their role in the war that divided the world (both literally and figuratively) so many centuries ago, what the continued existence of such weapons meant for Soul Society and the realm of the living both. But, in the end, she decided not to say much of anything to the shopkeeper.

"Well… it's nothing, really," she said, shrugging slightly. "It's just getting late… I'm attending school here to blend in, so I'll need to be up early. And I did say I'd walk to school with a few people I've met recently, so..."

Urahara nodded, smiled, and then waved her away from the store with a series of exaggerated "shoo" motions. She turned and hustled out of the store, just barely holding back a slight smile of her own at the shopkeeper's antics.

* * *

"Rukia?", Kairi's voice called out as she wandered the hallways of the mayor's house, which was a good bit larger than most in these parts. "Rukia, we'd better head off soon if we're all going to walk to school together like you said…"

She walked past a spare room on the second floor, noticing that its door was ajar and peeking in, but the bed seemed like it hadn't been touched in weeks . Sighing, she walked away from the door and thought out loud - "which one of these rooms _is_ she staying in, anyway?"

A sudden thump from the very same room she had just peeked into caught her attention. It was followed shortly afterward by sounds of rustling clothing, seemingly coming from the room that seemed to have been totally abandoned just a moment earlier.

Or rather, from that room's closet.

Kairi peeked in again just in time to catch sight of Rukia, now wearing her school uniform, tucking a pair of pink pajamas away in the closet and then sliding the door shut.

"Rukia, are you…"

Eyes widening, the disguised Soul Reaper rushed over to Kairi and held up one finger in a "shush" motion. Kairi paused for a moment, then finished her sentence in a loud whisper.

"...are you sleeping in that closet?"

She gave a hurried nod in response.

"We've got to get out of here quick," she whispered. "Sorry about this, but… the mayor doesn't actually know I'm in here, and-"

Kairi frowned.

"So what you're saying is," she said, hands on her hips. "You _snuck into my house?!_ "

Rukia prepared for the worst. Instead, Kairi's frown softened and she cracked up laughing.

"You could have just asked," she said. "I'm sure the mayor would let you stay for a while if you don't have anywhere else to go. It's not like anyone's using these rooms anyway."

Rukia gave a sigh of relief, then nodded as the two of them headed down the hall, down the stairs, and toward the front door. Kairi grabbed her bag as she passed the kitchen counter where she'd left it; Rukia was already carrying hers, apparently having packed it in the darkness of the closet sometime earlier that morning.

"Oh, and you can keep my old pajamas by the way," Kairi said, glancing just in time to see Rukia's face go red with embarrassment. "Those things haven't fit me in two years… I had no idea they were even still here!"

Before long, the two were joined by Sora and Riku. It was still early, much earlier than any of them usually left; the bell that signified the beginning of the school day wouldn't ring for another hour. Since they had plenty of time, they took a long way through a part of town that was almost entirely devoid of school-age kids and usually pretty quiet at this hour - they didn't want their classmates to overhear them talking about Keyblades and Hollows and the workings of the afterlife, after all. Rukia began by explaining to Sora, Riku, and Kairi what a Soul Reaper was, explaining Zanpakuto and their ability to send souls onward either by purifying Hollows or performing a ritual known as "Konso" on a normal soul, and revealing that the reason why everyone could see her at school - but not when she was out fighting Hollows - was thanks to a false body known as a gigai. Once she felt she had unloaded an appropriate (but not excessive) amount of information on the three of them, it was her turn for questions.

"So… now that you know a little bit about Soul Reapers," she began, "Tell me about your Keyblades. We've been told that Keybearers have been largely extinct for centuries, that hardly anyone alive knows the secrets of how to create and use a Keyblade… how did the three of you end up with them?"

Sora was the first to answer - and he simply shrugged.

"I dunno, really," he said. "It was weird. I just kind of… dreamed about it, I guess you could say. And then when I woke up, suddenly I could call it into my hand, just like that."

"Mine was a different story," Riku said. " _Way to the Dawn_ started out as a different weapon - a sword named _Soul Eater_ , a gift from an evil witch who was trying to manipulate me into doing her dirty work."

All sorts of horrible memories came flooding into his mind, but Riku pushed them back into the dark corners where they usually lurked and continued.

"After I wielded that sword for over a year, flooding it with all the powers of light and darkness that my heart could muster, risking my life in one battle after another… that old sword transformed, and a new Keyblade was born."

Kairi smiled. The contrast between Sora's way of going about things and Riku's was never more obvious than in the ways they had obtained - and, now, described - their respective Keyblades.

"And then there's mine," she said, glancing to Riku for a moment before focusing her attention back on Rukia. "I'm still not sure _where_ it came from, but I think Riku helped me out the first time I ever summoned it. He said he felt something like… memories flowing into his mind, for just a moment. Old memories, the kind that are still with you even though you can't bring them to the surface at will. And then, it was just… there, right when I needed it most."

Rukia gave her an odd look.

"So you're saying… there's not really any secret technique to creating a Keyblade?", she asked. "Nothing passed down from past generations, no training… they just spring into existence unexpectedly?"

Sora and Riku both nodded.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"I'm sure it's more complicated than that on _some_ level, but… that's all any of us knows."

Rukia didn't know what to think. On one hand, this was almost a relief; there might not be some secretive surviving group of Keybearers lurking just out of reach after all. The three she'd met so far seemed to have no greater goal than to just live their normal lives, only summoning their weapons to defend themselves (or others) when the need arose. They were a far cry from the Keybearers she'd heard of in tales from times long past, whose actions unbalanced the entire realm and lead to its current divided state. On the other hand, it was worrying that seemingly anyone could give rise to a new Keyblade - what would prevent the rise of rogue Keybearers if it was a weapon that seemingly had no rules, no restrictions as to who was allowed to call upon its power?

"Well… that's not what I was expecting at all," she said, smiling slightly. She had decided that, for now at least, the relief that these three kids were not part of some order of Keybearers walking in the footsteps of their destructive ancestors outweighed the potential downsides. "By the way… are you three the only Keybearers left, or are there others?"

"Nah, we're not the only ones," Sora said. "The King's got his own Keyblade too - and then there's Master Yen Sid, I guess he _was_ a Keyblade Master in the past, and..."

The spiky-haired boy paused for a moment, concentrating and trying to think of anyone else he might be forgetting. His mind went blank, no matter how hard he tried to remember, but he felt like he was missing someone obvious.

"There _were_ others," Riku said.

First, Roxas and Xion came to mind; Roxas had merged with Sora, and whatever remained of Xion had merged with Roxas even before that. He then briefly thought back to that day, over a decade ago, when a Keyblade Master had come from another world; it was so long ago that Kairi hadn't even arrived on the islands yet, way back before any of them had started school. To this day, he still hadn't told Sora or Kairi about It, but the memory was crystal-clear in his mind even after all these years.

"But… I'm not sure if there still are. The three of us and Mickey might be the only ones who've called upon a Keyblade in the past year or so."

Rukia blinked.

"Mickey?"

Riku nodded.

"The King," he said. "He's a mouse. Not like a regular tiny mouse though, maybe about half your height - stands on two legs."

Rukia blinked rapidly, not entirely sure whether she had heard him correctly or not. In the end, she decided not to ask, just shaking her head and changing the subject to more ordinary matters as the four of them took a turn back onto their usual route and headed for school alongside several other students about their age.

* * *

On the roof of a nearby building, a girl with silver hair in twin ponytails stood and stared down as the group passed by. That gnawing thought in the back of her mind, more than a week ago when the experimental Hollow known as "White" had exploded and leveled a section of the city, had been right after all - the Keybearers _had_ survived. How, she wasn't entirely sure; that blast would have been dangerous even for a captain-class Soul Reaper, let alone an unconscious human girl and two boys who even together had only managed to defeat the Hollow through sheer luck. But however they had managed it, they were clearly alive.

"Something's different, though," she said, narrowing her eyes and trying to focus in on their energies. The constant pulse of their hearts was obvious, but there was something else now, something radiating out from even deeper within. They were walking too close together to pinpoint which one of them it was, but she was sensing something from them now that hadn't been there before. "Is that…"

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Countless tiny blue flames flickered to life in her mind's eye - and then, abruptly, one of the larger ones nearest to her swirled into the shape of a Hollow's mask, with two long horns swooping from its sides and jutting forward. The wavering shape of the Hollow opened its mouth and roared, and she abruptly forced her eyes open again. She paused for a moment to catch her breath, a few beads of sweat forming on her forehead. And then, once she had calmed down a bit, her face broke out into a wide grin.

"A Keybearer… and a Hollow," she said, almost shivering from excitement. "So it's started… but not quite the way Lord Aizen planned."


	11. When the Levee Breaks

**Kingdom Hearts WHITE**

 **Chapter 11  
**

 _~ When the Levee Breaks ~  
_

That day at school was many times more ordinary than the conversations that had preceded it. Rukia spent much of the day doodling bunnies wielding Keyblades along the margins of her notes; Riku still had some slight suspicions as to what her motivation for asking them so many questions was, but the sight of these goofy drawings reassured him somewhat. Anyone who passed their time by scribbling silly things along the sides of their schoolwork couldn't be too bad, after all.

Sora's thoughts occasionally wandered to Soul Society and the Zanpakuto that Rukia had described; when class got too boring, he imagined himself wielding one, leaping from one roof to another and slicing Hollows apart while his dad cheered from the sidelines, saying prayers to purify the defeated Holows' souls as if he didn't realize that a Zanpakuto already did that on its own without any outside help.

Kairi, it seemed, was the only one of the four who actually focused entirely on school.

When the last bell rang and everyone was free to go, the three young Keybearers got back together and began to walk home. They hadn't planned on walking with Rukia again like they had on the way in to school that morning, but as they left the building they figured they might as well wait around for a bit to see if she wanted to join them again anyway. After waiting nearly ten minutes with no sign of her, they eventually gave up on that idea and walked off without her.

Standing on the roof of the same building she had perched upon earlier, unnoticed by everyone, was the silver-haired girl who had spied on them during their very first encounter with Hollows. She was dressed all in black, but not in the standard uniform of a Soul Reaper, despite the fact that a sheathed Zanpakuto hung by her side - her outfit had no sleeves and replaced the billowing baggy pants of the Soul Reaper uniform with a sort of wrap-around skirt which revealed much of her legs, covered only in fishnet stockings. She watched the three Keybearers walk for several minutes, waiting until they had taken a turn onto a street that was relatively empty. As the three stopped to look into a storefront window, she reached into her shirt and pulled out a tiny white disc, about the size of a coin. She held it outstretched in one hand, then with a sudden movement crushed it into dust and let what remained flutter down and scatter on the wind.

Almost immediately, something about the air changed; there was an odd sort of heavy feeling, a lingering sense of dread that hung over the entire city block. Kairi seemed to pick up on this change right away, glancing around for any sign of something that could have caused it, but at first she saw nothing.

"Did... did you two feel that?"

Sora shook his head and shrugged.

"Now that you mention it," Riku said, sniffing the air for a moment, "It _does_ seem like something's different all of a sudden, but..."

The sound of a Hollow's roar from somewhere nearby made it obvious just what kind of "different" they were dealing with. Sora looked up in the sky overhead and spotted the first of them, a relatively small Hollow flying along on three pairs of insectoid wings. It was soon followed by another, then another, then another, each slipping through from some other dimension into the sky above Innenjima. Before long, the air was swarming with Hollows of all shapes and sizes.

"Hollows in broad daylight?", Sora asked no one in particular, summoning his Keyblade and giving a confused look to the now not-so-clear skies overhead. "What the heck is going on?"

"No idea," Riku said, calling forth his weapon as well. He turned to Kairi for a moment, nodding slightly as she materialized her Keyblade too. "But I'm guessing it's got something to do with that weird feeling in the air... this definitely isn't normal."

"We can't let them just swoop down and snatch people up," Kairi said, watching as some of the smaller flying Hollows started to circle around particular areas, presumably just waiting for an opening to dive down and attack some unsuspecting pedestrian. "Come on - we've got to do something before things get any worse!"

Sora and Riku nodded in agreement, then took off running down the street at full speed. Riku swung around a lamppost and launched himself upward, bouncing off of an awning and then flipping up over the edge of a roof. Sora followed him into the skyline shortly afterward, running straight up a wall and climbing up over the edge of the roof just in time to bean a Hollow in the face with his Keyblade right as it began to swoop down. Kairi rolled her eyes at them and simply remained where she stood, aiming Keyblade upward and firing piercing bolts of light at any Hollow that began to descend. Every few seconds one of the three Keybearers would destroy another Hollow, but if anything their numbers seemed to be _increasing_.

"That's thirty-nine for me," Riku said, lowering his weapon after splitting another one of the smaller flying Hollows in two.

"Forty!", Sora called out, smashing into an airborne Hollow from above and destroying it as the two of them crashed to the roof below and his Keyblade pierced its skull. Two more came at him from different angles, but he unleashed a wave of fire magic that stopped them both in their tracks, then swung his Keyblade in a wide arc and destroyed them both at once. "Forty-one, forty-two..."

"Wonder how Kairi's doing," Riku said, glancing over the edge of the roof to see that their red-haired friend was still standing in the street, sniping the smaller Hollows out of the air from a safe distance.

"Hey Kairi!", Sora shouted down to her, causing her to flinch and miss a Hollow with her most recent shot. She glanced up at him, looking mildly annoyed. "How many are you up to?"

Kairi sighed.

"I don't know, I haven't been counting!", she shouted back. Then, turning just in time to jump out of the way as one of the Hollows swooped down and gouged a trail into the street with its bladed tail, she paused for a moment before thrusting her Keyblade through the Hollow's mask and continuing. "Probably over a hundred by now, if I had to guess!"

Sora's jaw dropped, completely at a loss for words at the thought that Kairi was wiping out the Hollows at a quicker rate than the two of them combined. Riku just smiled; it was no surprise to him, considering that she was fighting them from a long range rather than only going after those that came within reach. He turned toward Sora, planning on explaining this to him, but before he could get a word out he spotted an unfamiliar figure standing on another roof.

"Hey, Sora," he began, focusing his vision on the stranger as he walked past the spiky-haired boy. "You think you can handle all the Hollows over here on your own?"

Sora nodded and flashed a toothy grin.

"Yeah, these ones are no problem."

Riku nodded back, then took off running, making a flying leap onto the next building over. The silver-haired girl turned her head just in time to see him land ten feet away from her, glancing in his direction and smiling slightly.

"Okay," he said, walking toward her with his Keyblade at the ready. He glanced at her side, noticing the sword sheathed there; it reminded him immediately of the one he'd seen Rukia wielding before. "Who are you? Another Soul Reaper?"

She laughed.

"Soul Reaper?", she said, turning to face him. "Oh, no. Not anymore, anyway. It's been a long time since anyone's mistaken _me_ for a Soul Reaper!"

Riku expected her to reach for her sword at any minute now, but she kept her arms crossed in front of her, just staring at him. Judging by the way she was standing and the look on her face, she didn't seem to regard him as a threat in the least. Riku sniffed at the air for a moment and concentrated, trying his hardest to pick up any trace of her energy in an attempt to figure out who or what she was, but even his darkness-enhanced senses could tell him nothing. If she was putting off any sort of energy he could sense, it was so faint that it blended into the background noise; it would have almost seemed was as if she wasn't there at all if not for the fact that he could clearly see and hear her.

"So are you the one?", she asked. She took a step toward him, looking him over. "The one who 'White' has bonded with?"

"What's _that_ supposed to mean?"

She reached out with one hand and placed her palm over his chest. Riku flinched, but somehow couldn't bring himself to back away; it was as if he were rooted to the spot where he stood, with some incredible force preventing him from moving a muscle. For a moment, the silver-haired girl closed her eyes; then, opening them back up again, she shook her head and the smile faded from her face just a bit.

"Hmm... looks like you're not the one after all," she said, removing her hand from Riku's chest but not backing away. "That's too bad. You seemed so much more interesting than the other one."

Riku's eyes widened slightly.

"Are you talking about Sora?"

The girl cocked her head to one side.

"Sora... so that's his name," she said. She adjusted her head into a different position, then stared right into Riku's eyes. "Tell me… have you noticed anything _different_ about him lately?"

Riku took a slight step back. Immediately, he was reminded of what Urahara had told him after the three of them had woken up to find themselves in the back room of his shop; to call him if he anything about Sora seemed "different." For a moment the silver-haired boy glanced over to the other rooftop, where Sora was now clashing with a Hollow that resembled some sort of massive caterpillar or an unusually chubby centipede, all while avoiding the occasional dive-bombings from the smaller flying monsters that still filled the air.

"Not a thing," Riku said, turning back toward the mystery girl. "He's his usual goofy self. Were you expecting something else?"

She just laughed again and turned, beginning to walk away.

"Oh, he's changed all right," she said. "You might not have noticed it yet… but these things take time. 'White' is bubbling just below the surface… just waiting for the first opportunity. You'll see."

Before Riku could even try to go after her, the mysterious girl vanished in a burst of speed that his eyes couldn't even follow. He was about to jump to the next roof over and give chase, but the sound of a heavy crash and people screaming stopped him in his tracks. Down in the street below, Kairi had narrowly avoided a car that a massive elephantine Hollow had hefted in its arms and thrown in her direction. She raised her Keyblade and pointed it toward the Hollow, shifting the weapon's shape slightly so that the flowers on its edge curved outward and enlarged into trumpet-like protrusions, then grasped it just behind the flowery prongs and braced herself as a barrage of light beams burst forth in rapid succession, peppering the Hollow's body with small holes and sending it stumbling backward into a trash can, which was toppled over and crushed flat under its weight. The Hollow roared and lunged forward, the bleeding wounds already beginning to heal as it went. Kairi dodged three punches in a row, but then stumbled over a chunk of rubble, leaving her flat on the ground and momentarily helpless. She rolled to the side in time to avoid another punch, but the trunk-like tentacle growing from the top of the Hollow's head stretched out and grabbed her by the feet, hoisting her into the air and dangling her in front of the monster's jaws. Its mouth opened and it let out a horrible, cackling laugh as it swung her back and forth, then around in a circle, just quickly enough that the dizziness prevented her from lashing out.

Just when the Hollow stopped swinging Kairi around and was about to lunge forward to bite down on her, a strained battle cry echoed throughout the street. The sound of rapid footsteps followed, and then Sora came rushing past the Hollow, the look on his face far more serious than usual. With a single swing of his Keyblade as he passed, the bulky Hollow was sliced clean in two, its upper half topping over backward. Kairi jumped to safety as the grip of its trunk-tentacle loosened, then lunged and split the beast's mask with a single downward Keyblade stroke before its lower body could attempt to regenerate.

"Thanks," Kairi said, glancing over to the spiky-haired boy and smiling as she brushed herself off a bit.

Rather than responding with so much as one of his usual cheesy grins, he tore off down the street in pursuit of the nearest Hollow, plunging his Keyblade through the back of its head before it had even noticed his presence. Riku hopped down from the nearest building and joined Kairi, watching Sora as he destroyed one Hollow after another, launching his Keyblade into the air to strike down the flying ones (which had thinned out a bit at this point) and then having it spin back down to ground level at just the right angles to finish off their earthbound counterparts. At times, he even kicked off of some of the larger Hollows to position himself better; once, Riku swore he had seen him grab onto a smaller one with his bare hands and physically throw it into the path of his flying Keyblade.

"Wow," Kairi said, wide eyes darting about to follow the boy's wild movements. "Seeing that Hollow grab me must have _really_ set him off…"

Riku opened his mouth to comment, but ended up saying nothing, only nodding slightly in agreement. He hoped it was just that - just Sora going a little berserk at the thought of one of his closest friends getting eaten by a Hollow right before his eyes, which would be a perfectly normal response for him or most anyone else.

A set of light footsteps behind them caught their attention, and Riku and Kairi turned to see Rukia coming around the corner behind them, clad in her black Soul Reaper uniform and blade drawn. She was breathing a bit heavily, stopping to take a deep breath as she caught up to the two Keybearers.

"What in the world is going on out here!?"

Riku shrugged.

"Tons of Hollows just started showing up out of nowhere," he said. "That's all I know."

Kairi sighed slightly.

"We were hoping you might have some idea, actually…"

Rukia shook her head.

"This many Hollows shouldn't ever concentrate in one place like this," she said. "They're solitary, mindless creatures… it's not in their nature to attack in groups. The stronger Hollows even _eat_ the smaller ones from time to time."

Almost as if on cue, an absolutely massive Hollow stomped around the corner at the other end of the street, grabbing one of the remaining winged Hollows and stuffing it into its mouth. It swiped at several more of the flying ones without any luck, sending several cars tumbling across the street and splitting a streetlamp in two in the process, then scooped up a slower-moving, almost skeletal-looking humanoid Hollow before turning and noticing Sora charging in its direction.

The spiky-haired boy ran and slid right between the Hollow's legs, dodging a punch aimed at him - and then running right into the Hollow's tail as it slammed down, pinning him against the concrete. Sora gasped for breath, trying to move his arms without much luck. Riku immediately ran down the street in his direction while Kairi shifted the shape of her Keyblade again and charged up a massive amount of light-energy in the flowery decorations on the end. Rukia paused for just a moment, then took off running after Riku, flash-stepping to catch up with him and then running alongside him at normal speed. The two of them reached the Hollow just in time to see Sora cry out in pain as the Hollow pressed its tail down harder… and then lurch his head forward, biting into the nearest chunk of the Hollow's skin with surprising strength. Riku gasped at the sight; he had actually managed to draw blood. The Hollow's tail twitched, as did one of Riku's eyes.

Moments before Riku and Rukia reached striking distance of the monster, Kairi unleashed her own attack - the flowers on her Keyblade extended out even further than before, forming a circular formation out in front of the weapon which focused each sphere of light toward a single point in its center. She braced herself, and then a spiraling beam of light burst forth, shooting over the heads of the other two and severing one of the Hollow's arms instantly, causing the smaller Hollow it had grabbed to fall to the street and scuttle away. The giant Hollow roared in pain and staggered to one side, moving just enough for Sora to finally break free of its weight. Riku and Rukia struck simultaneously, each leaping upward and slicing through the Hollow's head as they passed. Moments later, it dissolved away into countless particles of blackness and dissipated into the wind. Before long, Kairi rejoined the other three, dematerializing her Keyblade just long enough to grab Sora by the shoulders and shake him a bit while asking if he was okay. He nodded slightly, then nearly fell over backwards. Kairi caught him in a hug, lowering him to the pavement a good bit more gently than gravity would have done.

"Sora, you're not okay at all," she said. "You're in no shape to keep fighting. You've just been squished under… I dunno, maybe a _ton_ of Hollow-stuff. Rukia's here now, though - we'll be able to handle this without you."

"No way," Sora said, standing suddenly and only wobbling a little before steadying himself. He coughed, flecking his jacket with a bit of blood, but wiped his face on his sleeve and shrugged it off. He raised his Keyblade to the sky, causing the green glow of healing magic to surround his body for a few moments. "There's too many of 'em. I've… I mean, _we've_ gotta keep fighting."

Sora's thoughts cleared slightly, the rage from before having been knocked out of him a bit along with the wind from his lungs when the giant Hollow's tail had slammed him into the street. As dozens of Hollows closed in on them from all around, he was reminded of a battle over a year ago, off on the distant world of Radiant Garden, where a thousand Heartless had been unleashed all at once and everyone had banded together to fight them. At the time he had almost given up; he knew that every Heartless he destroyed, every lost heart he freed, would just go to Organization XIII. But looking back, the alternative was much, much worse than whatever unknown plans Xemnas had for Kingdom Hearts - that world had already been overrun and destroyed by the Heartless once before, and he had seen the state _that_ left it in. Back then, just like now, there was really no other choice but to keep fighting.

"They're closing in on us," Rukia said, shifting her stance. "This isn't normal. Hollows aren't supposed to..."

For a moment, her nose itched. She reached up to scratch it and noticed that it hadn't been just a random itch - a fine white powder was blowing on the wind, fluttering down from someplace high overhead. Her eyes widened in recognition.

"I know what's happening here," she said. "That white powder… that strange, heavy feeling in the air… it's Hollow bait. Someone's spread Hollow bait across the city - that's what's drawing so many of them out!"

"Hollow bait?", Sora asked. "Who the heck would _want_ Hollows to show up?"

"It's a restricted substance in Soul Society, used for training exercises," she explained, "In small amounts, of course. And using Hollow bait in a populated area is strictly forbidden…"

"Huh," Riku said, glancing away from Rukia and staring down the legions of Hollows that were approaching from one end of the street. "Looks like somebody didn't get the memo."

With nothing more to say for the moment, the four took off into the crowd of Hollows, plowing through the weaker ones in rapid succession. Unnoticed by any of them, a strange ripple was beginning to form in the sky, high above the streets where most of the remaining Hollows lurked. The numbers of the flying Hollows above them continued to thin out more and more, but now it was not because Rukia and the three Keybearers were destroying them - any that drew too close to the disturbance in the air simply vanished, being pulled toward the rippling air and then being swallowed up into nothingness in a matter of moments.

"Looks like they're finally letting up a little," Riku said, wiping some sweat off his brow as his Keyblade - now surrounded by the purplish dark-energy blade he had called upon several times in the recent weeks - sliced through three Hollows at once and stopped just short of cleaving a mailbox in two along with them.

"Yeah," Sora said, clobbering an ape-like Hollow across the face with his Keyblade so hard that the mask's teeth cracked and then finishing it off with a thrust when it attempted to wind up for a punch. "Wonder how the girls are doing?"

Riku glanced back over his shoulder.

"Things are looking pretty good over there," he said. "Rukia's fast, and she always aims to finish them off in one shot. Kairi's gotten pretty good with that Keyblade lately, too. At this rate she's going to leave both of us in the dust."

Sora laughed.

"You really think so?"

"Wouldn't have said that if I didn't," Riku said. "Think about it, only a couple weeks of real fighting and she's doing stuff like _that_?"

Sora turned just in time to see Kairi unleash the spiraling beam of light again, eyes going wide as it tore through dozens of Hollows and then turned sharply upward just in time to avoid piercing through the building behind them. He blinked a few times, then turned back toward Riku and grinned.

"So? That's not _that_ much different from my Ragnarok, right?"

Riku chuckled.

"Of course. Who do you think she's been learning from?"

Sora paused and blinked for a moment, then grinned even wider than before. He had never really thought of himself as a teacher, not even when it came to Keyblade-fighting techniques, but he kinda liked the idea that Kairi was picking things up so fast thanks to all the time they had spent fighting Hollows together. Unfortunately, he'd let this thought distract him from the task at hand; while Riku leaped out of the way just in time to avoid another giant Hollow stomping toward them, Sora only barely had time to spin around and raise his Keyblade in an attempt to block the incoming attack. The Hollow's foot smashed into him, slowly pressing him further and further into the ground; he pushed back with all his strength, but it just wasn't enough. His legs were straining against the weight; his arms, too. He gritted his teeth, trying to pull forth all the strength he could muster in one burst. Riku watched as his eyes took on a strange glazed-over look and his face twisted into an uncharacteristically violent snarl. With a shout that almost sounded more like a roar, he finally managed to push hard enough to unbalance the Hollow.

" _Get offa me!_ "

With a heavy crash, the gigantic beast fell over, crushing a smaller Hollow flat as it went. Sora breathed heavily for a few seconds, just standing hunched over with his Keyblade grasped tightly in both hands, then took off running with another battle cry before Riku could even suggest that maybe he should handle this one. The silver-haired boy followed shortly afterward, slicing at the large Hollow's leg just as it had managed to stand and throwing it off balance again. Combined with several Keyblade-swings from Sora, this toppled the Hollow once again. Riku raised his own Keyblade, the larger sword of darkness still surrounding it, preparing to split the downed Hollow's mask before it managed to stand. Before he had a chance, however, another Hollow's prehensile tongue suddenly lashed out and wrapped itself around the Keyblade. Riku attempted to jerk his weapon out of the tongue's grasp, but found that this only caused the energy surrounding the blade to suddenly sputter out and fade away. The Hollow's tongue retracted, leaving a slimy coating behind.

"What in the…"

Riku shook his Keyblade, flinging the slime to the ground, and tried to energize the blade once again - but nothing happened. Well, nothing good, anyway - when he tried again, after the few moments of concentration that would normally unleash the power of darkness within him and mold it into a sword surrounding his Keyblade, the weapon's colors faded to a dull purplish gray for a few moments before it disappeared in a flash.

Sora charged at the spiky frog-like Hollow that had seemingly destroyed Riku's Keyblade, but was caught up in the hand of the larger Hollow the moment he took his eyes off of it. The silver-haired boy's eyes widened at the sight - Sora was visibly gasping for air, unable to do anything against the Hollow's overwhelming strength. He held out his hand and tried to summon his Keyblade to it once again, but nothing happened. A glimpse of movement out of the corner of his eye alerted him to an even bigger problem - the frog-Hollow was on the attack again, whipping its tongue at him so quickly that it swished past his leg as he moved to dodge, tearing through his jeans and leaving behind a nasty burn on his skin as it passed. A trail of its saliva dribbled along the pavement, causing it to bubble and fizz as if somebody had just dumped out a gallon of acid. He flipped and rolled out of the way of several more tongue-strikes, dodging out of the way of the first few without much difficulty but finding that they came closer and closer each time.

While all this was going on, Kairi and Rukia had succeeding in clearing out the masses of smaller Hollows from their side of the street - much like Sora and Riku's side, only a few larger and more dangerous ones remained. The two girls were both visibly exhausted; Kairi's hair was almost dripping with sweat, and her hands that once held her Keyblade just as firmly as either of the boys were now shaking slightly. Rukia was in better shape, but was still breathing heavier than before and had to reach up to wipe some sweat off her brow before it dripped down into her eyes.

"Almost done," the little Soul Reaper said, noticing Kairi's shaky grip. "Just hold on a little longer. There's just a few left over here…"

Kairi nodded, then steadied her grip and fired a barrage of light-bullets through the mask of the nearest Hollow, causing to to collapse and then dissolve away. Rukia charged at the three remaining Hollows as Kairi held them off with a flurry of beams, slicing through one of their masks as effortlessly as always and then spinning out of the path of another Hollow's clawed hand as it made a feeble attempt to swipe at her. Another Hollow nearly caught her in the back with a swipe of its own, but she ducked just in time and the two monsters ended up crashing into each other, stumbling and falling in a tangle of horns and claws on the ground. One Hollow opened its mouth wide and bit a chunk out of the other, and Rukia took the opportunity to finish them both off with a single swift slash from her Zanpakuto, sheathing it a moment later as she lowered her head for just a moment before turning toward Kairi.

"Oh… oh no," Kairi suddenly called out. "Sora!"

Rukia turned in the direction where the redhead's attention was focused and gasped at the sight. Riku's Keyblade was gone, and he was struggling to dodge the attacks of a medium-sized Hollow which was repeatedly lashing out at him with its stretchy tongue. Sora was in even worse shape, clasped in the hand of one of the largest Hollows they had seen all day, trying to scream but being unable to draw in enough air to make a sound.

" _Damn it,_ " Riku thought, picking up speed as another near-miss tongue attack left a burn across his back. When another attack came his way, he wasn't fast enough to dodge and was forced to surround himself with a barrier of darkness, deflecting the tongue with a flurry of glowing purple hexagons that materialized among the swirling black aura around him. " _Without my Keyblade… I'm struggling just to protect_ myself _. In this condition I can't do anything for Sora, for Kairi… for anyone else. I'm…_ "

There was a swishing sound somewhere nearby, and Rukia suddenly appeared in a burst of speed, drawing her sword and pointing it toward the ground. The Hollow that held Sora in its crushing grip stared down at her, raising its other hand high in preparation to punch her into the pavement.

"Dance," she said, twirling her sword in a circular motion as a flurry of snowflakes swirled up around her and a long white ribbon extended from its hilt. "Sode no Shirayuki."

In an instant, her sword - blade, handle, and all - became as white as pure snow. The Hollow's fist came down, but she vanished just before the impact and reappeared behind the monster's back in a crouching pose, swinging her sword out in a circle around her as she passed.

"Some no mai," she said, closing her eyes as the ground around the Hollow began to glow white. "Tsukishiro."

Before the Hollow could even realize that it hadn't actually hit its target, its feet became encased in ice. When it began to struggle against the freezing grasp, the ice just reached higher, covering its legs. And then, in an instant, a pillar of ice rose high above the city, encasing every part of the Hollow's body aside from the arm that held Sora. As Rukia stood and reopened her eyes, the pillar - and the Hollow inside - shattered into countless fragments, scattering across the street for a few moments before rapidly evaporating away. The Hollow's severed arm fell to the ground with a heavy _thud,_ freeing Sora from its grip as it disintegrated. The spiky-haired boy landed on his hands and knees, gasping for air; before he could even attempt to stand, Kairi was by his side, almost crying as she hugged him with a grip that was nearly as tight as the Hollow's had been.

The frog Hollow that was attacking Riku kept up the assault in the face of his barrier, repeatedly slamming its tongue into the shield. The silver-haired boy clutched his chest with one hand; he was starting to have trouble breathing now, holding up a barrier of this strength for so long, but he couldn't think of anything else. Without his Keyblade, his darkness powers were all he had to rely on - and without a Keyblade to focus them, they were far less reliable than usual. Just when he was about to give up and lower the barrier, he felt something change - power welling up within him from somewhere, power he didn't recognize. As the Hollow pulled its tongue back and prepared for another attack, he smirked and lowered his barrier. Kairi and Rukia both gasped, and the Soul Reaper took a step toward him, preparing to finish the Hollow off herself. Before anyone else had a chance to do anything, however, the Hollow's tongue shot forward, the spiked tip on the end aiming directly for Riku's chest.

There was an explosion of energy, causing Rukia to stop right where she stood for fear of being caught up in it. When the smoke began to clear, it became obvious that the Hollow's tongue was still extended, stretching from its mouth to Riku's chest. The others feared the worst. Riku took a deep breath, then shouted at the top of his lungs, causing a gust of wind that blew away what remained of the smoke and revealed that something had changed.

In place of a normal human right arm was a heavily-muscled one with pitch-black skin, a single white ribbon trailing from its shoulder and connecting to Riku's back in a way that made it seem to be merging with his clothes. The Hollow's tongue had clashed against Riku's arm, stopping there as if blocked by a weapon rather than causing any damage whatsoever. It retracted its tongue and tried to shoot it forward once again, but Riku stepped to the side and grabbed it with the strange black arm. Fumes hissed from the tongue on contact, but Riku didn't even flinch. The burning touch of the Hollow didn't hurt anymore - it seemed as though there was no feeling in that arm anymore at all, though he could somehow still control its movements. Pulling the Hollow toward him by the tongue, he surrounded his other hand with an aura of darkness and thrust it forward as the monster came within arm's length, sending it flying backward. With another tug, he pulled it back toward him and then let go, waiting until they had nearly collided again before delivering a single powerful uppercut to the Hollow's chest with the black arm.

Everything seemed to slow down for those few moments; a rush of wind and a flame-like burst of purple energy tore through the Hollow, ripping it in two as it was sent flying upward. Sora, Kairi, and Rukia could only stand back and watch, wide-eyed, as the two halves of the frog-like Hollow sailed through the air and began to fall back down, dissolving away into nothing before they could reach the ground.

"There… that's the last one," Riku said, slumping to his knees and breathing heavily. "Isn't it?"

Rukia nodded slightly. The street was, indeed, completely free of Hollows. Kairi helped Sora to his feet, the two of them crossing their Keyblades and focusing their magical energies together in order to heal him enough to stand on his own again. And then, a horrible sound of something twisting and tearing filled the air, echoing for miles around. Halfway across the city, cars stopped and dozens of people driving home from work got out to stare and point at the sky. What was previously a faint ripple in the air, barely noticeable even if you were looking directly at it, was now an enormous crack… and it was growing wider by the second.

"N-no," Rukia stuttered. "No. It can't be…"

A pale, bony hand that dwarfed most of the Hollows they had fought that day emerged, grasping the edge of space itself and pulling so that the crack in the sky widened even further. The Keybearers could only stare up at it in stunned silence as the vast shape beyond the void dragged itself closer and closer, until finally a gargantuan Hollow mask with a long, pointed nose began to emerge.

"That Hollow… that's… I've only ever seen them in textbooks back at the academy before," Rukia explained. "Hundreds… maybe even _thousands_ of Hollows, all merged into a single entity… a Menos Grande."


End file.
